Philosophy

2010-05-22T05:54:00.000-07:00

Good Morning Friends,

Pragmatism (the philosophy, capital P) overlaps with Idealism (the philosophy, capital I), in my view. And just as the philosophy of Pragmatism has a different meaning, is more dynamic - and I think, empowering - than the common usage of the word 'pragmatism' would indicate; so is the philosophy of Idealism different from what the common usage of the word 'idealism' would indicate. In fact, viewed from a certain angle, one might say Idealism is, in a way, almost a cynical philosophy - or at least its implications might open the way for cynicism.

Idealism: "the philosophical doctrine that reality is somehow mind-correlative or mind-coordinated - that real objects constituting the "external world" are not independent of cognizing minds, but exist only as in some way correlative to mental operations. The doctrine centers on the conception that reality as we understand it reflects the workings of the mind.

"Perhaps its most radical version is the ancient Oriental spiritualistic or panpsychistic (I have no idea what this word means either) idea, renewed in Christian Science, that minds and their thoughts are all there is - that reality is simply the sum total of he visions (or dreams?) of one or more minds.

"A dispute has long raged within the idealist camp over whether "the mind" - at issue in such idealistic fomulas was a mind emplaced outside of or behind nature (absolute idealism), or a nature-pervasive power of rationality of some sort (cosmic idealism), or the collective impersonal social mind of people in general (social idealism), or simply the distributive collection of individual minds (personal idealism). Over the years, the less grandiose versions of the theory came increasingly to the fore, and in recent times virtually all idealists have construed "the minds" at issue in their theory as separate individual minds equipped with socially engendered resources.

"There are certainly versions of idealism short of the spiritualistic position of an ontological idealism that (as Kant puts it at Prolegomena, section 13, n.2) holds that "there are none but thinking beings." Idealism need certainly not go so far as to affirm that mind makes or constitutes matter; it is quite enough to maintain (e.g.) that all of the characterizing properties of physical existents resemble phenomenal sensory properties in representing dispositions to affect mind-endowed creatures in a certain sort of way, so that these properties have no standing without reference to minds. Weaker still is an explanatory idealism which merely holds that an adequate of the real always requires some recourse to the operations of the mind" (Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy. General Editor, Robert Audi. 1995).

Let me say a word about the teaching of philosophy, before we "unpack" this definition. I think it would be well if, someday, the educational system would make a distinction between teaching students, who want to be philosophers, how to philosophize, how to do philosophy; and teaching students how to historicize philosophy, how to be historians of philosophy - because here we come to an important distinction to be made between knowledge and information, which I'll come back to.

As usual, the rest of this passage is about the great figures of the past who worked with Idealism and their various points of departure, and differences of opinion and intellectual rivalries and debates they had over these. For those who want to be historians of philosophy, these facts are crucial. The history of philosophy is important.

History in general is about the kinds of events and sequence of these, as well as the patterns of social, cultural, political, economic, technological, and intellectual movements that led to the lives we lead today. The history (of philosophy) is about the great thinkers and their ideas and innovations, which had practical consequences for political life, and led to the ways we think today, whether individuals are consciously aware of this or not.

The practice of philosophy is about moving our knowledge of the natural world and the mind forward. Indeed, we hope to convert knowledge into information, which we convert into knowledge converted into information. And on and on idefinitely. Remember I told that philosophy is the unmanned probe from the base of concrete human knowledge (I should have said information).

Let me give two definitons.

Knowledge: the search for insight into the nature and ways of the mind and natural world, as a
whole; by knowledge, I mean the act of seeking, a process not a thing; knowledge
can be "remembered" or recreated in the Platonic sense - I'll come back to this.

Information: this is converted knowledge into proven doctrine - an aspect of the sciences and
mathematics; information also comes from human activity, which is outside of
nature; history, economics, finance, politics are not knowledge, in that they cannot
recalled in the Platonic sense. You cannot recall The Treaty of Westphalia of 1648,
for example, because it is outside of nature.

On the one hand it is important to distinguish between knowledge and information, there is also overlap between the two. Mathematics started as the process of knowledge (as defined above) with the aim of practically solving a problem; once the problem was solved, we arrive at the "starting point for reflection," but in the meantime we have information, in the form of a set of proven set of doctrines; and with the field of theoretical mathematics, it is again converted into knowledge, about there can be and is disagreement.

Physics, chemistry, biology, and all the sciences are like this. I would imagine that the ratio of knowledge to information, tilts very heavily toward the former in the fields of archeology and anthropology. History seems to be mostly informational, and yet there are occasions when the knowledge process might be activated - where the particular headscratcher might not simply involve crucial missing documents, where a different way of seeing might be called for, where assistance from other disciplines like anthropology, sociology, and the like might be necessary, and so on an so forth.

Economics is something like the sciences, in that the field is presented to us as informational, with an origin in knowledge-seeking. But the appearance of the field of behavioral economics can be read as the conversion of informational economics back into knowledge-seeking economics, about which there can be and is disagreement among various seekers.

But its important to say that physics, math, and all the sciences can be learned through Platonic means, since the informational doctrine is never outside of nature. History cannot be learned in this way since man-made events are most decisively outside of nature.

My thinking on this is powerfully influenced by Plato's idea that learning is about recollecting what we once knew but forgot (Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, 1995, p.620). In a sense the general memory of how the information was originally acquired, was forgotten, and reassembling this memory can lead us back knowledge-information about the natural world.

You can take a definition of philosophy, and if you trust yourself, you yourself can work through all the implications and possible points of departure from it; and in this way you can cover all the territory once traveled by the great and not-so-great thinkers of the past without knowing who a single one of them were.

This is so because the practice of philosophy, philosophizing, is an intuitive, personal, empathetic process. It is wholly within the realm of nature. They way we think is natural, because the way we came to be is natural. Anyway, the confusion of knowledge and information is another way in which the educational system is tilted heavily in favor of good memorizers, even in the humanities.

Friends, until our educational system is appropriately restructured, here is a technique that might help you cope. Use this technique for philosophy, psychology (including so-called 'abnormal' psychology), sociology, archeology (not anthropology, then again, perhaps with some aspects of physical and cultural anthropology at that), not history (events outside of nature), not theology, not geology [though this is the area of the natural world, I'm not sure that the informational doctrine can be approached through introspection; geology doesn't lend itself to "thought experiments" like physics and chemistry.

In any events, try taking the basic definition of a conceptual movement in philosophy, sociology, or something, then, trusting yourself, think through - by yourself- all the directions it can take you. Write these down. Next choose the names of formal movements and the historical figures associated with them, and match them up with the self-generated implications that match up best with these.

If, like me, you are not a good memorizer, you may find that this technique helps your memorization. You may feel a more organic connection to the material. You may feel more like you "remembered" these things. And if you do this, you may find that the answer to that age-old question - posed by Gatorade - "Is it in you?" is yes.

Let's go to another post.

wingedcentaur

2010-05-21T10:10:00.000-07:00

Friends,

Does it seem to you that our educational system is, by a long, long way tilted in favor of people who are good memorizers and test-takers, as opposed to those whose talents might lie elsewhere?

It does?

Well, that's understandable, I suppose. Government is always anxious to produce business-ready high school and college graduates for, well, business firms - and thus contribute to the "health of the economy." The "accountability," and "choice," and "merit pay" for teachers, the narrowing of the curriculum and "teaching to the test," seem to be reflective of the perception that business is solely, impersonally, dispassionately, logically about the "bottom line."

But one of the revelations that always comes up, during a crisis, but that we soon forget, is that business itself is often not very "business-like." I mentioned a book, before, by Paul Fussell called Class: A Guide Through the American Status System (1983).

One of the amusing take aways from this book concerns class mimicry. I defined that as the tendency of people, in general, to ape certain characteristics of those social classes above them, in order to appear more prosperous than they are. The thing is, when we try to mimck the social behavior of the classes above us, we almost invariably always get it wrong. We act out an illusion. We are usually so far off base that our mimicry cannot even be fairly called caricature or satire.

Fussell makes this point convincingly in category after category, in a variety of ways. I won't go into it here, but I think I mentioned that this is one tragicomic irony of "No Child Left Behind" and "Race to the Top," (is it?) of the current administration. They think they're giving business what it wants.

But it seems that what business actually wants and needs, are people with imagination and a kind of creativity that comes from, in part, from a broad-based liberal arts education - even when a company's goal is to rip off the public. I gave Andy Fastow of Enron and Bernard Madoff as examples. Yes, what they did was slimy, but it was also creative.

You know, I'll pick this up later.

wingedcentaur

2010-05-21T06:01:00.000-07:00

Good Morning Friends,

We're going to wrap up here, our topic having been Pragmatism (the philosophy) and class stratification. We asked the question why class stratification happens despite people's best efforts to create egalitarian institutions. We looked at the Soviet Union in the fifties, which had already "evolved" a ten-class social system.

We looked at Israeli farm collectives at the turn of the twentieth century. There is a perspective that would have liked to have seen the manual workers and farmers, of these communities, remain on top socially as they had been at the beginning; they would have liked to have seen this community remain a "worker state."

But, sociologically, its like a see saw, with the "brain" or "clean" work class eventually remaining on top, or the bottom holding workers aloft, depending on your perspective. There seems to be a transition period when new societies are being created - when things are a bit rough and the rugged sort of John Wayne character is needed, and glorified, to tame things.

The adventurer, doing his job so well, actually expedites his own extinction. After "civilization" is established the managerial sort is needed to sustain it. Hopefully, the civilized state lasts far, far longer than the transitional stage. Hopefully, the civilized state continues in perpetuity, indefinitely. And so, the adventurer becomes "obsolete." This is almost mathematically obvious when one thinks about it.

It is the "knowledge worker" who is seen as vital in "holding society together," and so forth. One of the criticisms made of, the first post-conquest viceroy of Iraq, Paul Bremer's "de-Baathification" policies, was that they created a "brain drain" effect. They drove away, and sometimes underground with the "insurgency," a lot of the educated professionals who already knew how to run the society like teachers, engineers, and the like.

Brain-drain is not a term I like, because it implies that those people who are left behind do not have intelligence. When you confront commentators on this, they will undoubtedly say that they didn't mean it that way.

I could be wrong, but I think that, deep down, they did mean it that way. Not only is the term an insult, but it reflects an incorrect view of the nature of knowledge. It does not acknowledge the relationship between the perceived-abstract and the perceived-practical.

Now, the adventurer, in the form of the national security state, tries to avoid riding off into the sunset of obsolescence, by: A) insistently assuring us how "wild" the situation still is; B) creating adventures for itself, being provocative, talking belligerently about (with respect to one nation or another) "keeping all options on the table," and so forth; and C) deploying the "Buffalo Bill" solution and telling us how many threats they delivered us from, popularizing, and, sometimes, we think, even fictionalizing their exploits.

Again, I would refer you to the Adam Curtis BBC documentary "The Power of Nightmares," which is online. For example: A) We need only recall George W. Bush's "Axis of Evil" speech, and before that Ronald Reagan told us the Soviet Union was "The Evil Empire"; B) I would just cite, here, the constant rhetorical harassment of the nation of Iran by U.S. officials, and also we might cite what many think of as the "spreading" war on terror, into Pakistan, Yemen, etc; C) We are constantly being told that "we" are fighting the terrorists "there" so we don't have to fight them "here," and so forth, and, as you know, there are many people who believe the U.S. went to war in Iraq on the basis of "cherry-picked" intelligence.

But returning economic class stratification, none of us would suggest that society be convulsed deliberately in order to bring about, once more, a "wild" situation in which the worker can once again reign. The goal of making a classless society is total freedom, not to exchange one rulership for another. What is needed, in my opinion, is a proper understanding of the nature of knowledge, which I talked a little about before.

If I had my druthers I would restructure education in general. For example, I think more dialectical materialism is needed in the study of history. I know this term 'dialectical materialism,' may have unpleasant Marxist associations for some of you, and you may think that this approach is horribly "reductionist," meaning that it reduces the passions of history-makers to crude material motives. But, as we have discussed in detail, materialism is not just materialism and money is not just money.

Money and material possession are symbols - unwholesome ones when accumulated in excess - of man's desire to become God.

Dialectical materialism offers a way in which we might teach an "integrated" curriculum. What is the study of history, as we largely have it today? It is white, heterosexual, male, bourgeoisie/aristocracy, political triumphalism, little more than kings and popes lists. I think I mentioned this before, but some observers are concerned about what they think of as de facto or "voluntary" school segregation.

This is hardly surprising since the curriculum itself is segregated. Because of this we don't really know how to be together across class, ethnic, "racial," and sexual orientation lines. Some of your "best friends" might come from x group, but if you examine your interactions I think you will find that you keep it light, you keep it relatively superficial. You stick to sports, travel (if you're of the traveling class), shopping, sex, and the like. There are certain places you don't go, certain things you don't and can't talk about. You don't want to make each other uncomfortable. This is the fault of bad education. Deep down, we really don't know what to say to each other.

Moving on, I think math could be taught differently, to make it more accessible to more people. We have the discipline as a fixed set of rules, equations and formulas, what have you. We tend to think mathematics as something handed down from Heaven whole cloth. But before we had math it had to be created or discovered, piece by piece, part by part.

I would say that the initial exploration of mathematics, thousands and thousands of years ago, started as a joint abstract-practical investigation. It was practical in that an "immediate" problem, of how to express a relationship, needed to be solved. It was abstract, in that it was an engagement with language.

Math is a kind of language or sub-language. Math is a response to a desire to bring more precision to communication, in one sense; and as such this is the province of intuition or the abstract. When we "reach" to find the "right word" to express ourselves in a given situation, this is a very intuitive, abstract activity. But as math is taught the intuitive element is entirely cut out.

And yet the fact of the existence of something called theoretical mathematics, indicates the intuitive, abstract aspect of math. If this level of math is speculative, it must mean that there is room for disagreement among mathematicians concerning their field, even though we may not be used to thinking about it this way.

Does all this mean that I think everyone could be train to the exact same level of proficiency in math? No.

It's like this: most of us over 18 have a driver's license. But only a tiny fraction of us have the skill of a professional race car driver. And yet we can all handle a car. I believe math, as well as the sciences can be taught in such a way that gives us all driver's licenses, at least. The distance between the "professional" scientists and mathematicians need not be so very vast; and because of this we, the public, are so susceptible to misconception, gross error, and "old wives" tales.

Let me end by saying, that I'm beginning to suspect that one reason there were so many "polyglots" (multitalented) thinkers in the ancient world, as we're told there were, is - in addition to the relative scarcity of data - the fact that they understood the relationship between the perceived-abstract and the perceived-practical much better than we do today.

wingedcentaur

2010-05-20T10:40:00.000-07:00

Friends,

What would the schools of the future look like and how would they function to keep class stratification to a minimum?

I don't have a blueprint, just some scattered thoughts. The most important thing, to my mind, is that these institutions would constantly teach generation after generation of students, the intertwined nature of the perceived-abstract and the perceived-practical, in order to prevent the artificial separation and segregation of "brain" or "clean" work from manual or vocational work, like a plumber.

There is something I forgot to mention in the last post. I said how intellectual work is largely mental housekeeping, to show that it is not as dynamic as we think. But how do you know that your plumber is not inspired by Poseidon, to make a marvelous innovation in his field, which might not only improve toilets (if such things can be improved) but also might also lead to improvements in water distribution systems for large sectors of the world's population - and for which he may be robbed of credit, not to mention royalties.

Suppose a young man graudated high school and wanted to be a farmer. He would go to a four-year school, we wouldn't necessarily call them colleges or universities, and they would be somewhat different from liberal arts universities.

Now, the farmer would learn everything technically he needs to know about agriculture, everything. But during those four years he would also learn about an area comparative mythology concerning the god of agriculture, literature concerning that theme (Grapes of Wrath, for example), and the history of agriculture. But the mythology would be most important.

The same true for the plumber (Poseidon, literature (perhaps works dealing with the sea), history of plumbing.

The same true for the electrician: (Zeus, literature on the topic, and the history of the electrician's field)

The same true for the carpenter: (the relevant mythology, literature touching on the theme, and the history of carpentry)

And so on and so forth. I'm leaving out jobs like sanitation worker, and so forth, because these are jobs created by the bulimic, deindustrializing, urbanizing aftershocks of capitalism.

I'll wrap this up in the next post, with a very small word about education in general.

wingedcentaur.

2010-05-20T07:54:00.000-07:00

Friends,

The society that is brought about by the adventurer lasts much, much, much longer than the transitional phase, of which he, the adventurer, was a part. Most such figures have trouble making the transition, if they can at all, unless one is a character like Buffalo Bill. The adventurer becomes an anachronism, and when this happens class stratification sharpens.

The connection between the seeming abstract and the seeming practical is lost, and the two dimensions become segregated. The former come to be seen as more important than the latter; because it is the former that is seen to be necessary to keep society functioning, and the latter needs to be a tool of and subordinated to it. The hands need to listen to the head, when before it was the other way around.

How can we get the head and the hands to get to work, without one ever subordinating the other?

I think there are certain educational changes that need to be institutionalized. What needs to become embedded in the education system is this: our intial foray into knowledge [in all its retroactive glory, which is mistakenly, in retrospect, seen to be the sole exploratory journey of abstract thinking man - to the extent that the abstract and the practical are erroneously seen to be mutually exclusive] has a practical aim of solving a specific problem; and when this is done we are at the "starting point for reflection" [this starting point is mistakenly, in retrospect, appropriated solely as the area of abstract thinking man; but abstract man joins the practical man here, again, to the extent to which the abstract and practical are seen to be mutually exclusive]. Practical man's role is completely obliterated from memory.

Thus, the college professor of comparative mythology earns vastly more - over time - and is accorded far more social status than the plumber. The former is seen to be an opinion-maker and thought-moulder, and "leader" of society; and the plumber (even if he earns more money than the professor) is seen as a grunt to take orders.

Another thing that happens, here, is so-called intellectual work (one has to be careful here because charge that sometimes gets leveled at us Luddites is "anti-intellectualism") is seen to be more dynamic and changing than it is. And manual or vocational work is seen to be more static than it is.

As Noam Chomsky said "The hidden truth is that a large amount of scholarship is clerical work. In fact, a good deal of science is detailed, routine work. I'm not saying it's easy - you have to know what you're looking for and so on - but it's not an enormous intellectual challenge" (Imperial Ambitions: Conversations on the Post-9/11 World. Interviews with David Barsamian. Metropolitan Books. Henry Holt and Company. New York, 2005. p.139).

This hits us as counterintuitive at first, but makes sense, at least to me, when you give it some thought. After all, no "knowledge worker" can think up an innovative thought every twenty minutes. A lot of what she does, walking around, briefcase in hand, in her power suit, to and from and at work, a frown on her face, looking important and bothered - is mental, conceptual housekeeping: playing around with the exterior and interior of your house; moving the furniture around; deciding which you shall keep, what you will throw away, what you will donate to Goodwill, and what you will give away, and what you will fix; and so on and so forth.

This is another dimension of what I mean when we talk about the connection between "theory and praxis."

Let's go to another post.

wingedcentaur

2010-05-20T04:02:00.000-07:00

Good Morning Friends,

We're back talking about Pragmatism and class stratification. We gave a formal definition of the term and worked through it piece by piece, as it were. What is most important for us is something I mentioned before: the intermingled connection between the speculative, abstract, and theoretical and the concrete, logical, and the like; this connection remains but we forget it, and in this way work becomes stratified, with one kind of work, "thinking" separated from "manual" or "trade" work.

However, I want to remind you that what is called practical is not as practical as practical thinks it is; and speculative is not as speculative as speculative thinks it is. We gave an example of this with the story Slavoj Zizek tells us about toilets. We said that thinkers are every bit as responsible for the toilet as the people who wrought it with their very hands.

And the manipulation of objects (say, innovation in toilets) contributes to the world of ideas. I said that I didn't have exact proof of this, however [again see Authors@Google: Slavoj Zizek] Slavoj Zizek seems to be able to take inspiration, as a thinker, from innovations in toilet design and construction.

Remember, the "outcome of directed action" is the "starting point of reflection." We seek knowledge to solve a specific problem, and once we solve it we get to thinking... In this way the utilitarian feeds the theoretical, and the theoretical feeds the practical. It is a constant, circular relationship. But we forget this.

Question: Why is it that despite people's best efforts to create a classless society, elites spring up? Why is it that, in a sense, the more things change, things remain the same ultimately?

For example, in addition to the way Washington had seemed to have exaggerated the menace of the Soviet Union, its egalitarian nature seemed to have been exaggerated, as we now know. But I don't say this cynically.

This seems to have been noticed in the fifties.

"The Soviet Union, despite its professions of achieving a society of true equality, is becoming more precisely stratified each year. The need of the expanding industrial machine for a hierarchy of managers and specialists as well as workers of varying skills provided, and in fact perhaps demanded, a social structure to match" (Packard, Vance. The Status Seekers: An Exploration of Class Behavior in America and The Hidden Barriers That Affect You, Your Community, Your Future. David Mckay Company Inc. New York, 1959. p.19).

I'm not making a political punch against the old Soviet Union or Communism. It's just that any statist system is going to behave this way.

Alex Inkeles, with the Russian Research Center at Harvard, had concluded that Russia under the Communists, had evolved a ten-class social system. Classes ranged from the ruling elite (officials, scientists, top artists and writers) down through managers, bureaucrats, three classes of workers, two classes of peasants to the slave laborers. To formalize the classes Russia had been requiring more and more of the millions of its civilians to wear uniforms to show their exact position within the system. In 1958 a group of managers and technicians visited America. They were billed by the government as "ordinary." But inquiry revealed that these ordinary folks earned an income that was five times that of the typical Soviet worker (Packard, Vance. The Status Seekers. p.19).

At the turn of the twentieth century some folks set up hundreds of farm collectives in and around the territory of what would come to be called Israel. Originally it was "productive" workers (manual laborers, farmers) were the ones glorified because their talents were needed to settle the arid land and few of the immigrant Jews had any experience with the kind of work, as they were mostly intellectuals and white collar people. "Brain" or "clean" work was scorned an non-productive. Furthermore, in the early days managers were elected on a rotation basis (Packard, Vance. Status Seekers. pp.19-20).

But over the years, it developed that highly regarded, capable men got elected managers, again and again. They tended to return less and less to "productive" work, and higher prestige began shifting from "productive" to "brain" work. Also, an "aristocracy" of "old-timers" emerged, and had become the main source of managerial talent (Packard, Vance. Status Seekers. pp.19-20).

The question we want to ask is: Why does this happen?

If you have never heard such information before (and neither had I), I think we can intuitively grasp the truth of this. Think of the western film genre as a whole. What is the overriding thematic concern, or one of the main thematic concerns?

I would argue that one of these is this: it takes one kind of man to "settle" or "win" the "wild" west. The west must be tamed for civilization to be able to grow. The "injuns" must be subdued and severely marginalized, if not utterly wiped out. The out-of-control white criminal element must be controlled. Forests must be cleared and predatory animals must be hunted out of existence or pushed back into the new border separating the animal world from the human. And so on and so forth. There is must work to be done preparing the west for civilization.

And yet it takes another kind of man to civilize the west and continue the civilization. At this time the kind of men needed are shopkeepers, teachers (mostly women, yes?), preachers, dentists (who used to perform surgery), doctors, and the like. Such a place also comes to need artists, especially writers and storytellers. People in civilized society like to hear stories about the good old days when "men were men," and so forth.

The John Wayne or Clint Eastwood character is the adventurer who "wins" the west, but, sadly later finds himself - I hate to say this - obsolete (You might check out the Twilight Zone episode "The Obsolete Man"starring Burgess Meredith).

There was one western adventurer we all know of who solved this problem. He was both the adventurer and his own fictionalizer. In this way he made the transition from one phase of history to another. He escaped the fate of becoming irrelevant or a "dinosaur." That man was William Frederick "Buffalo Bill" Cody (1846-1917).

According to Wikipedia, Cody earned his nickname by killing 4,860 American Bison. He was also a soldier. Apparently he was also a trapper, "bullwhacker" (whatever that is), a "Fifty Niner" (again, whatever that is) in Colorado, a Pony Express rider, wagonmaster, stagecoach driver, and even a hotel manager. Wikipedia makes clear that we don't know how much of this biography is real and how much is fabrication - which was Cody's genius. But he was certainly a soldier and buffalo hunter, perhaps even something of an anti-slavery activist. William Cody, of course, was best known for his Wild West Show.

That's it, William Frederick "Buffalo Bill" Cody refused to allow himself to become obsolete.

Therefore, one way to look at the way the national security state, of America or any other country, justifies itself is the Buffalo Bill solution - an apparatus that justifies itself by using every technique of public relations at its disposal to popularize and fictionalize itself and the dangers it conquered and continues to conquer. Again, I would refer you to the excellent documentary film, "The Power of Nightmares" on the BBC by Adam Curtis.

Curtis's convincing is this: in the past politicians promised us a better world; those dreams failed therefore the fell back on promising to protect us from nightmares of Islamic terrorism.

Perhaps the national security apparatus, as a whole, are afraid of peace. Hard to justify an empire if there's peace. The national security apparatus probably, as a whole, wouldn't know what to do with themselves if there was peace. The military industrial complex wouldn't know what to do with itself, with all of those soldiers on at least sixty bases around the world. What would the various intelligence agencies do with themselves if there was peace. What would the defense armament industry do with themselves?

I think that military overcapacity could be converted into additional capacity for space exploration and undersea exploration. They could be put to work searching out other planets for humans to live on, as well as looking into the feasibility of setting up human colonies under the sea (I hear the sea levels are rising and so forth). They could be put to work formulating, designing, and implementing those things necessary to help human society adapt to those changes in the atmosphere that have been irretrievably set in motion by global warming. There's lots of other things they could do.

wingedcentaur

2010-05-19T17:53:00.000-07:00

Friends,

A formal definition of Pragmatism:

"a philosophy that stresses the relation of theory to praxis and takes the continuity of experience and nature as revealed through the outcome of directed action as the starting point for reflection."

The idea of western civilization and the western toilet are intermingled and constantly intermingling. As Slavoj Zizek once put it, as soon as you flush the toilet "you're confronted wth ideology" (for me, a subdivision of philosophy). There is a continuity between the idea of western civilization and the artistic, yes, artistic and engineering work that went into building the device itself, are constantly pushing against each other as we speak (this is a crude, weak way of putting it, but its the best I can do right now). The idea and the thing are two sides of the same coin, as it were.

"Experience is the ongoing transaction of organism and environment, i.e., both subject and object are constituted in the process." The first clause seems straightforward enough, living experience comes from you interacting with the world. Out of that world, or void, in fact, for our purposes, both the tools for furthering your experience and the specific ends to which that tool will be used, are derived.

So, a chimpanzee sees a heavy branch and gets the idea that it might be good to use that to crack open a coconut or something like that. Perhaps the branch is the subject which the chimp will use with the object of cracking open the coconut. In this way one begins to contextualize his world by making choices. That coconut could just as easily be cracked open with a heavy stone, or whatever. But the relationship of the branch to the coconut is "constituted" in this way.

"When intelligently ordered, initial conditions are deliberately transformed according to ends-in-view, i.e., intentionally, into a subsequent state of affairs thought to be more desirable. Knowledge is therefore guided by interests or values."

We seek knowledge, initially, for a specific purpose of solving a problem, for taking us from here to there, to make things "better." This "better," whatever that might be, are the ends-in-view. But when we have solved the problem, we get to thinking... We get to thinking about things beyond the initial utilitarian concern, this is our "starting point for reflection." In other words, abstract ideas led to the development of the toilet, and innovation in toilet design and construction, will, I think lead to contributions to the world of ideas.

Again, see Authors@Google: Slavoj Zizek. Changes in toilets seem to inspire him, albeit in a tiny part, to come up with interesting and provocative ideas. I hear some people call this Slovenian philosopher "The Elvis of Cultural Commentary."

"Since the reality of objects cannot be known prior to experience, truth claims can be justified only as the fulfilment of conditions that are experimentally determined, i.e., the outcome of inquiry."

The definition in quotation marks comes from The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy (1995).

Good Night and Good Luck!

wingedcentaur

2010-05-19T14:50:00.000-07:00

Good Evening Friends,

Today I want to begin talking, a little bit, about the philosophy of Pragmatism and class stratification.

The philosophy of Pragmatism (capital P) is a far more dynamic system than the common usage of the word 'pragmatism' (little p) would suggest. For me, Pragmatism has to do with the intertwinedness (yes, I've invented the word 'intertwinedness,' intermingled nature) of the abstract, speculative, and theoretical on the one hand, and the concrete, practical, and logical on the other. It has to do with the constantly rotating intermingledness (intermingledness?) of the unseen and the seen. Becoming Pragmatic has to do with remembering this, not realizing or coming to understand this - but remembering it.

What I mean by all this gobbledegook is embodied in the story we get from Slavoj Zizek, about the toilets. As he tells it, remember, he got interested in the three basic western style of toilets: the French, with the inner hole at the back - waste goes down, to the back, and disappears; the German with the inner hole at the front - waste passes by the face of the sitter on its way to...; and the British and American with the hole in the middle, along with, apparently, a greater quantity of water to cut down on the smell, and so forth.

Zizek became curious about why one toilet was made this way, and this one another, and so on and so forth. He asked "engineers" about this, and they tried to give him unrelenting, utilitarian answers, as if theirs was the only true way to make a toilet. This, of course, was an odd expression of nationalism, as it turned out

Then Zizek asked himself where he'd seen that trinity before. Then it came to him. Some two hundred years ago, in Europe, there was a popular idea that the defining essence of western civilization was contained within three exemplars: the civilizations of Britain, France, and Germany, as understood in two categories, political ideology and preferred sphere of life.

Britain and America
political ideology: "liberal democratic" moderate
sphere of life: Economics

France
political ideology: leftist, revolutionary
sphere of life: politics

Germany
political ideology: conservative
sphere of life: philosophy, literature, arts, etc.

Therefore, it is right that the German toilet has the inner hole in the front; that the waste literally confronts you as it is flush, that you come face-to-face, in a way, with what was in you. The preferred sphere of life of Germany, two hundred years ago, at least according to the theory, was the humanities, the disciplines that require deep thought and introspection - introspection is the key word.

See a talk Zizek gave on this at Authors@Google: Slavoj Zizek. I don't know if he was kidding when he said this part (I hope so) but he said that it used to be a part of German hygiene that one made a daily inspection of one's stool.

It is right that the inner hole of the French toilet is at the back. This is in keeping with the revolutionary heritage of the country - waste is liquidated, immediately put out of sight.

It is right that the British and American toilets have the hole in the middle, with the waste floating on water before its removal. The key word is middle or center, as Britain and America, being "liberal democratic," were perceived to be in the political center of Germany and France.

So what I mean, here, by Pragmatism is that the thinkers and philosophers who formulated, developed, and maintained those ideas, are every bit as much the creators of the western toilets as the plumbing engineers who physically wrought the toilet with their hands and tools.

Conversely, I think it must be true that the manipulation of objects contributes to the world of ideas. There's a back and forth, circular relationship between the abstract idea and the practical manifestation, the practical manifestation and the abstract ideas. But we forget this, and because we do so, class stratification emerges, because one form of work is ultimately glorified over another.

How does the manipulation of objects contribute to the world of idea?

I don't have an exact answer to this. But remember when I told you that bodybuilding, for example, is a form of prayer? This is one of the ways that man tries to become God - in that the bodybuilder, through his activity, is trying to attach himself, vainly of course, to one of the infinite capacities of God - the ability to exercise ultimate control over the shaping of his body, the ability to sculpt oneself as fully as a sculptor molds a piece of clay.

"Thinking" work become separated from "manual" work, and we forget the intermingledness of these. Moreover, we think of the latter as more static than it is, and the former as more dynamic than it is. But I'll talk about this more fully elsewhere.

Let's go to another post.

wingedcentaur

2010-05-16T07:04:00.000-07:00

Friends,

I don't know if I mentioned this before but the Cold War seems to be very similar in dynamic to Greek mythology.

Greek mythology, perhaps all mythology in which humans are involved, seems to me to be about the rivalries of the gods of Olympus with each other. They could not fight each other directly because their elemental powers would risk destroying all of them, the whole world. Therefore they had to channel their conflict through a safer channel, humans.

Wasn't it very much this way with the United States and Soviet Union? They could not fight each other directly because of their nuclear weapons, which could destroy the world. Therefore they had to channel their struggle through a safer channel, the Third World. It was in the Third World where their international propaganda war and violent secret operations were waged. The goal would seem to have been to convince a greater share of the world, than the other power, that they, either the Soviet Union or the United States, was the light and the way. I think all of the espionage, secret operations, economic outreach - if you want to call it that, propaganda, and all the rest of it can be seen in this light.

In other words, the United States had to prove that American liberal democracy and capitalism was superior to Soveit communism, and vice versa. We saw this when Francis Fukayama triumphantly declared the "end of history." It was like the football player who scores the touchdown and spikes the ball, and perhaps dances a little jig, in the in-zone.

The purpose of the imperial conflict between the gods of Olympus was to win the most followers. The ultimate strategy can be understood, I think, as each god trying to have the most humans, by far more than any other god, declare that he or she is the most glorious deity.

The United States, having won that battle for glory, became isolated and in fact finds that its glory, paradoxically, is rather hollow without someone else to challenge it - like Alexander, so the legend goes, who wept when he found no more worlds to conquer.

And the U.S. in its isolation has folded in on itself. Its isolation in foreign affairs in several of its policies, I've previously mentioned, is a morbid manifestation of Alexander's tears. This is why the war on terror or the war on drugs (Is that one still on?) can never stop; or if it does, some other war must replace it.

wingedcentaur

2010-05-16T05:53:00.000-07:00

Good Morning Friends,

Can countries go insane? By this I mean can the basic governing structure of a country, as a whole, go insane?

Many people point to the fall of the Soviet Union as the point where we begin to find a real decline in democracy in America. As I mentioned, many people point to the period of 1945-1989 as a kind of golden age in many areas: freedom and diversity of the press; culture (even television was better); education to a certain extent (we remember we talked about the reactionary character of it with the launch of the Soviet Sputnick in 1959, before the United States); workers were better off; and so on.

Left activists like Tariq Ali and Michael Parenti for example advance the argument - and I agree with it - that the existence of the Soviet Union provided a way for activists to kind of shame, if that is the word, the United States into at least curbing its rougher edges in terms of international affairs and public repression. A freer press was something the United States could hold up, in its cultural propaganda war against the Soviet Union, to prove that the American way was superior to the Soviet way, and in doing so, inspire unaligned nations to come over to our side, and so forth.

This is what lead me to pose the question: To what extent is culture itself, by definition, defensive and reactionary in character? Let me put it another way.

Remember, long ago, we talked about the nature of individual identity. We talked about the dynamic, accretive, accumulative, life-long process of identity. Identity, in other words, is not a thing, but rather a process. On Star Trek the Borg say, "You will be assimilated." They can only survive by "assimilating" alien species. They have to reproduce themselves in this way.

You may remember, this is what I proposed is the case with people in actuality. In this connection I asked why it should be that when an individual is isolated somewhere with no human contact for an extended period of time, he should become unraveled (by the way, see the Twilight Zone episode "Where is Everybody starring Earl Holliman, which gives a really good illustration of what I'm talking about).

A person in such a situation may do things like put a sock on his hand and try to engage in conversation with it. Why does he do this and why does this behavior seem to lead to his unraveling? I proposed:

There is no Self without others, and because this is so, the Self needs nourishment of other people just as regularly as the body needs food and water to survive and thrive
Whe the Self, like the body, is starved of the nourishment of others, the Self tries desperately to survive by attempting to split itself into two parts: one acting as the "original" Self and the other as the "separate" interacting other; what is happening is that the Self is trying to survive by simulating person to person interaction.
But ultimately the performance is eventually given up as futile, because a bisected Self cannot produce the spontaneity needed to stimulate spontaneous, natural development in the originating Self. You are you, so therefore you talking to yourself - to put this crudely - can never keep yourself "alive," at least not indefinitely.
This process is similar, in my view, to what happens to a starving body. The metabolism forces the body to eat itself in a desperate attempt to survive until access to nourishment becomes available.
In the late stages of his isolation (again see the Twilight Zone episode I mentioned) the person will collapse in exhaustion - it is at this point when the person has become "insane," not when he's talking to the sock on his fist. It is at the point of collapse that this happens, because he has given up hope of identity.

The various aspects of personality become decontextualized. There is no reaction to our words, gestures, mannerisms, and the like. To put it more crudely, there is no "pushback." Therefore you don't know what you're doing anymore, or if it matters - to anybody.

Throughout the history of the world there have been great empires, but they always had rivals and competitors. This is the first time in human history when one global superpower has ever existed by itself. We all know the statistics: the United States spends at least four hundred million a year, maybe a solid half billion, a year on the military apparatus, and that's not counting the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. This is more than the rest of the world combined spends on their militaries.

We have no "pushback" and therefore it is not pejorative to say that America is "isolated" in international affairs. We don't have to review the data about how most of the world sees American involvement in the Middle East, in the Israeli-Palestinian question, the pressure tactics against Iran over its nuclear development, its failure to adopt the Kyoto global climate change protocols, it position with respect to the International Criminal Court, and so forth, its ongoing war of attrition against Cuba, and so on and so forth. Example after example after example can be cited, chapter and verse, as to how severely out of phase with the rest of the world, the United States is.

And let's not forget the Patriot Act, The War on Terror (though I understand it's not officially called that anymore), torture (the quibbling about what is torture as opposed to "enhanced interogation" techniques is revealing).

In a sense the War on Terror seems to be indicative of the folding over of the Self, that we see in individuals who are kept in isolation for an extended period of time (again, see Twilight Zone episode "Where is Everybody?"). So I am not particularly criticising the United States, I am proposing that this shows the dangers of empires, and all states on the imperial path behave this way, and if, by chance, they become the Undisputed World Heavyweight Champion of the world, there foreign policy is likely to become decontextualized in their isolation from the rest of the world.

Let me also reccommend an excellent documentary film (available for viewing online) called The Power of Nightmares - a BBC film by Adam Curtis. The U.S. obsession with Al Quaeda (which the film explains was a name given to the collection of Islamic jihadists, with only national aspirations, assembled and trained by the CIA, for use against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan) served a very similar purpose ideologically, that obsession with the Soviet Union [a "threat" we now believe to have been exaggerated] did for U.S. policy makers. I think it is quibbling to attribute this solely to the so-called "neoconservatives," though the film identifies them as catalysts in the American policy of nightmares, deployed both at home and abroad.

The obsession with Al Quaeda and the Taliban is a reflection of a government that doesn't seem to be sure it exists without an enemy to fight.

2010-05-13T14:00:00.000-07:00

Friends,

So, why is government taking this "accountability," "choice," "merit" approach to education reform?

On one level the answer is pretty straightforward. Government wants to give the business community, what it (government) thinks it heard business say they want in terms of quality of manpower. Government is trying its best to be responsive in educating children, shaping them into the kinds of graduates and employees government thinks it heard business say they want and need.

Indeed, in the words of Richard Cavanagh, President and CEO of The Conference Board in 2006, "It is clear from the report that greater communication and collaboration between the business sector and educators is critical to ensure that young people are prepared to enter the workplace of the 21st Century."

But the ideological roots go much deeper than that. It goes back to the rise of neoliberalism and the idea that "government's not the solution to the problem. Government is the problem," as Ronald Reagan told us. The idea pervaded that everything in life, that society should be run like business, the most logical, efficient way; and this included government, with politicians's obsession with the "deficit" and "balancing the budget," and so forth.

But I think the tragedy of this approach to education is that it may not even be what business needs, on their own terms, or want. I know this seems ridiculous given how intimately involved the business world is with privatized education "reform," and since they are so involved with it, presumably they are getting what they want.

I would say that in a funny way, the business community are a victim of their own propaganda - reflected back at them..

But how can I suppose to know what the business community wants and needs?

Of course we know that they need competent people, strong in all the basic skills, the three Rs, naturally. But they also need something that can only come, in part, from a broad education in the sciences, humanities, and arts. That 'something' is imagination.

The business world need recruits with imagination, particularly in this stage of capitalist development, in which finance is king and the ruling class are shunning actual production. Congress may put in some regulatory reforms. If they do and these reform actually have "teeth," corporations will need recruits with imagination more than ever - in order to come up with ways to make money through paper shuffling, getting around those regulations. I don't even think the bourgeoisie care that much about the corporations they own except as platforms to propel them into Old Money status.

Take Bernie Madoff. Yes, what he did was illegal, unethical, and immoral. But it was also creatively intricate. We may never know the true extent of the wealth he accumulated from himself, his family, and other powerful people. If he sufficiently convolutedly devious in his preparations, the wealth of his most important clients and millions he accumulated for himself will go undiscovered and hidden offshore. I get the feeling he was sufficiently devious enough.

We talked about the small distance between the illegality of Bernie Madoff and the general Reality-is-what-we-say-it-is, mark-to-market, patent-hoarding legally sanctioned neoliberalism.

What about Andy Fastow? He was he chief financial officer for Enron when Jeff Skilling was there. As CFO it was Fastow's job to see that the finances of Enron were kept in order. Unofficially it was his job to create financial instruments that hid debt and puffed up the "bottom line." He created debt-hiding instruments he called raptors.

On a NPR radio station I listened to an interview with a young British playwright who put on a play about Enron. She explained that Fastow loved movies from the nineties. Raptors came from Jurassic Park.

Now, however these things worked, they did for a time - time enough to make a lot of money for Enron. But Fastow didn't learn how to do the things he did reading some business-econ textbook. His deception showed a creativity born of someone who seems to have had a broad-based liberal arts education. It takes imagination to take a concept of a certain kind of dinosaur from a movie and apply it to energy trading business finances.

Government reforms in education don't seem to be intended to foster that kind of creativity in students. We hear about an inordinate focus on testing and "teaching to the test." We hear about the constriction of curricula, since school administration get desperate to show constantly improving test scores - their federal funding often depends on it.

You ever see those ads for obscure colleges that promise to help you meet your destiny? You ever notice how narrow their curricula are, always having to do with criminal justice, business management, and maybe human resources?

Let's go to another post.

wingedcentaur

2010-05-13T07:54:00.000-07:00

Friends,

We ended with the question of nationalization of the outlying bloated specialty schools, hoping to raise them to a standard in which the four-year degrees actually mean something. The question is: What would be the standard? Hold that thought!

I just remembered that I wanted to mention something about the New Deal. Any serious historian will tell you that it was not the New Deal, but World War II that lifted America out of the Great Depression. The New Deal mostly established business regulation and the social saftey net. A safety net is something that is there to catch you when you fall. It is not something that can, by definition, stimulate growth in an economy, though somepeople say that Roosevelt didn't spend enough on the "stimulus."*

We know that there are problems in secondary education. We hear that a third of all incoming college freshman have to take at least one remedial course. www.usatoday.com/news/education/2008-09-15-Colleges-remedialclasses_N.htm

It is said of employers that "despite a shiny new diploma, may routinely give applicants basic tests in academic skills to see if they can read and follow instructions, write reports, and function in a job.

"Very much related is a recent study that indicated that the number one reason given by employers for rejecting applicants is an inability to effectively communicate, especially during a job interview.

"Interestingly, follow-up interviews with the rejected applicant indicated that the applicants appeared to be totally unaware of the problem."www.cybercollege.com/plume3.htm

But what about those young graduates without basic skills who do get these jobs?

In 2006 a report was put out by The Conference Board, Corporate Voices for Working Families (don't laugh, that what its called), the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, and the Society for Human Resource Management. The goal was to examine employers view of the readiness of new entrants into the U.S. workforce. We're talking about high school graduates, two-year college or technical school graduates, and four-year college graduates.

I'll give two findings from the report. More than 40 percent of employers surveyed said that incoming high school graduates were insufficiently prepared for the entry-level jobs they hold. They lack basic skills in reading comprehension, writing, and math. Seventy-two percent of incoming high school graduates are seen to be deficient in basic English writing skills, including grammar and spelling.

Poor writing skills seem to be a problem for two- and four-year college grads as well. 47 percent of all employers asked said that two-year graduates were deficient in this area.www.conference-board.org/utilities/pressdetail.cfm?press_id=2971

I think it should be understood that grade inflation (in allegedely "real" universities) and the education bubble work together to produce these effects. You can Google the words 'lack of basic skills' and 'workplace' to be taken to many articles talking about the massive investment companies have to make in workplace education programs.

Incidentally, one might say that crises in education are endemic to capitalism.

But there must be a social difference between those young people, lacking basic skills who get hired for these jobs, and those lacking basic skills who do not. After all, "[w]hen all students receive high marks, graduate schools and business recruiters simply start ignoring grades. That leads the graduate schools to rely on entrance tests. It prompts corporate recruiters to depend on a "good old boy/girl" network in an effort to unearth the difference between who looks good on paper and who is actually good.

"Put to disadvantage in that system who traditionally don't test as well or lack connections.. In many cases, those are poor and minority students who are the first in their families to graduate from college. No matter how hard they work, their A's look ordinary."www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/2002/02/08/edtwof2.htm

I'll pick this up later. We have a little way to go yet.

wingedcentaur

2010-05-13T04:15:00.000-07:00

Good Morning Friends,

This is part four of our discussion of the education bubble. I think this reality is the origin of the seemingly intractable and interminable "debate" between the mainstream left and mainstream right. Of course, the lines of the debate used to be more sharply drawn. It used to be that the Democratic party were more supportive of public education and teacher's unions.

It used to be that the Democrats believed in directing as much public resources as possible to the public system in terms of textbooks, computers, and yes, even teacher salaries, though its hard to remember now. Now the Democrats speak of "merit" pay.

Its important to remember that when people recall with such fondness, the "good old days," they are thinking about New Deal America and all that went with it. I suppose the period went from about the end of WW II in 1945 to about 1980. Of course the New Deal started earlier than 1945, but I pick that date for our purposes, because that is about the time - as I understand it - that the apparatus of what is called the "national security state" started to come into being.

It was in 1947, I believe, that Truman signed the National Security Act which formed the CIA and the other organs of the internal security and foreign intelligence gathering apparatus. So, not only was a strategic contest waged against the Soviet Union, but also a cultural propaganda war. We had to show the world that the American Way of Life was far superior to the Soviet model.

People look back to this period before 1980 as the golden age in many respects: the golden age of media, never had there been so much freedom and diversity; the golden age of economic equality, economic polarity between the classes seemed to be the least in the industrialized world; the golden age of civil rights, more formerly excluded "minority" communities were gaining their rights at a seeming blistering pace; the golden age of first amendment protection; the golden age of culture, indeed, even that medium sometimes call the "idiot box" seemed to be far superior in substance and quality than what we have today; a golden age, even of education, perhaps - we know that when the Soviet Union launched Sputnick in 1959, this infused a new urgency, especially in science and math, and it is against this background that president Kennedy made his pronouncements about the destiny in space (we couldn't let the Soviets outdo us in space), and no one was a more dedicated "Cold Warrior" than John F. Kennedy and his brother, the U.S. attorney general at the time, Robert Kennedy; unions and collective life in general had never been stronger than in this period.

And all of this must be seen in context of the one hundred fifty years of rising real wages in exhange for rising productivity, from about 1820 to 1970, as Dr. Rick Wolff tells us. During this period it must have really seemed to most people that the "rising tide lifted all boats." And I must say, all of this raises questions, for me, about the extent to which culture itself is defensive and reactionary in character. I'll come back to this.

New Deal America was also a golden age of bipartisanship. There were liberals in the Republican party and conservatives on the Democrat side. While there are still conservatives in the Democratic party, the so-called "blue dogs," there are no liberals in the Republican party, indeed, even their moderates seem to be an endangered species, with many of them making the tortured decision to register as "Independents." As a result, the Republicans are more conservative than the Democrats are liberal.

There is a seeming paradox between the sharp rise in partisanship over the past thirty years and the unifying effects, on both parties, of what is called neoliberalism or the "Washington Consensus." The argument can be made that since their differences are so narrow, now, their argument naturally increases very sharply in intensity.

Coming back to education, as far as I can tell, the Democrats and Republicans are more or less united around the need for "choice," which includes charter schools and the like, "accountability," reflected in test scores, and "merit" pay, as opposed to a guaranteed decent standard of living for teachers.

Now, the Republicans tend to be more careful about spending than their opposites, saying that education is not a problem that can be solved by "throwing money at it." If we return to the education bubble that Paul Fussell told us about, of the 1950s and 1960s, we can say that the Repubican position - as far as it goes - is quite right. The Democrats, having "thrown" money at education clearly caused a bubble, which caused hundreds of "nonselective" specialty schools to inflate themselves into universities, in order to attract federal funding; and in doing so, graduated millions of students with four-year degrees, who experienced no income advantage at all over high school graduates.

As I mentioned before, I know this must be so because I have personally seen this dynamic operate.

But from the point of view of the government, what was the alternative? With all those young men coming back from overseas after the war, something had to be done with them. They had to be occupied in some way, because as everyone knows "an idle mind is the Devil's workshop."

What about nationalization? Could and should the government have nationalized those 1728 bloated specialty schools to bring them up to standard? Should and could the government do this today?

But what would be the standard? - I'll come back to that. Let's go to another part.

wingedcentaur

2010-05-12T19:10:00.001-07:00

Good Evening Friends,

We're on part three of talking about the education bubble of the 1950s and 1960s. We talked about a study done by New York Times reporter, Edward B. Fiske in 1982. He found that out of nearly two thousand institutions calling themselves universities, only 265 were worthy of the name; the rest were bloated secretarial schools, business schools, vocational schools, "provincial" theological schools, normal schools, and teacher's colleges. These schools were, no doubt, very good at educating people in their core competencies upon which they were founded, but they had made the transition to allegedly full-fledged universities that was in no way proper and coherent.

It is this basic fact that is behind the myth that a four-year college degree, no matter where its from, puts the holder of the degree over everyone else without a four-year college degree.

One commentator wrote "In 1940 about 13 percent of college age young people actually went to college; by 1970 it was about 43 percent" (1). But Paul Fussell, in 1983, said emphatically no, it was still about 13 percent, the other 30 percent going to things merely calling themselves universities. Fiske's selective findings seemed to suggest that the number would always be 13 percent (2).

In his book, Class: A Guide Through the American Status System (1983), Paul Fussell wrote "One of the saddest social groups today consists of that 30 percent that during the 1950s and 1960s struggled to "go to college" and thought they'd done that only to find their prolehood (proletarian, working class status) still unredeemed, and not merely intellectually, artistically, and socially, but economically as well" (3).

In Social Standing in America, two researchers called Rainwater and Coleman published their findings, which said that going to a good college (or a real one, any one of the 265 mentioned at all by Fiske) increased one's income by 52 percent. Going to a really good one (or one of those Fiske gave five stars increased it 32 percent over that. But they found that one achieved no income advantage at all, if he graduated from a "nonselective" college - one of the 1728 organizations left unmentioned by Fiske (4). NO INCOME ADVANTAGE AT ALL!

Paul Fussell published his book in 1983 and here we are in 2010. I don't know how many "universities" there are today in America, and I don't know how many of those subpar institutions may have improved sufficiently to deserve the title; but it seems to me that the same dynamic is still operative today - in terms of about a seven to one ratio of bloated trade schools to real universities, handing out degrees with little or no value [also remember the rampant grade inflation in the Ivy Leagues and other non-Ivy but otherwise legitimate institutions of higher liberal arts, humanities, and science learing].

I know this must be so because I have personal experience with this. I went to a good university, Rutgers in Newark. This is a real liberal arts, humanities, and science university. But I did not finish my degree. Unfocused, I worked for a long time in low-wage service sector jobs - UPS here, Shop Rite there, a security guard some other place, and so on and so forth.

But I always came in contact with fellow employees at these places who had graduated college. These were not all twenty-something youths passing time before they went off to graduate school or their "real" job. No, these were often college graduates who, nevertheless, spent many years as fellow security guards or stock clerks, or the like.

Sure, they tended to be "supervisors," having sweated it out long enough to have earned a paltry modicum of "status" on the jobs. There were several college graduates at my last job, a liquor store, who had worked there for years. I would have thought that their college degrees should have enabled them to be doing work several orders of magnitude beyond the service sector slumming.

There was a manager at UPS who said that he had a master's degree. He said something about "the more oars you got in the water, the better off you are." I remembered that phrase because it was so colorful.

You see these college graduate laborers had always been a mystery to me. I guess the mystery's solved.

Let's go to a part four.

wingedcentaur

1) Fussell, Paul. Class: A Guide Through the American Status System (1983). p.133

2) ibid

3) ibid, pp.133-134

4) ibid, p.134

2010-05-09T17:39:00.000-07:00

Friends,

In the early eighties, a man called Edward B. Fiske, then a reporter with The New York Times published a report called The New York Times Selective Guide to American Colleges, 1982-1983 (1982). At this time the United States had almost two thousand institutions calling themselves four-year colleges awarding bachelor's degrees. Fiske's operating premise seemed to have been that in a world in which the word 'institute' had lost its meaning, it was a fair bet that the words 'college' and 'university,' may have also lost their currency (1).

Fiske set out to identify the "best and most interesting" of American institutions of higher learning. He used a rating system of five to one stars. A school had to get at least one star to get on the list of worthwhile organizations of post secondary education. He rated things like academic quality, social activity, and "quality of life." Fiske's investigations led him to conclude that only 265 of the 2000, were even worthy of even one star (2). This left more than 1700 left unmentioned. We'll come back to those 1700 in a moment.

A lot of the 265 got only one or two stars. One of these that got two stars was Syracuse University. The result came, in part, from questionnaires filled out by students, as well as private interviews conducted with them. Fiske had to conclude:

"classes are large."

"registration is a mess."

"the library... is understocked."

"admission standards tend not to be very rigorous."

"varsity sports are big."

Also the opinion came back that too much teaching was done by graduate students (3). Pretty damning. But remember, Syracuse at least made the list of 265 worthy institutions of higher learning.

Where does this leave the other 1,728 other organizations calling themselves universities?

Paul Fussell wrote: "Educational opportunity" opened up by the process of verbal inflation, by promoting, that is, numerous normal schools, teacher's colleges, provincial "theological" seminaries, trade schools, business schools, and secretarial institutes to the name and status of "universities," thus conferring on them an identity they were by no means equipped to bear, or even understand... What was happening in the 1960s was simply an acceleration of a process normal in this country - inflation, hyperbole, bragging... Here it's as natural for every college to want to be a university as for every employee to want to be an "executive," and every executive a vice president" (4).

They were, no doubt, encouraged in this by an ocean of federal money. And by the way, this situation is not unlike what is happening today, as we speak almost. You may recall recently that New York missed out on millions of dollars of federal money because of the state's cap on the number of charter schools it allows. Both Governor Patterson and Mayor Bloomberg were very upset about this.

So, more than seventeen hundred schools calling themselves universities, with all that implies, were, in fact - and I suppose a great many still are - bloated secretarial and trade schools. Do you know what this is like?

Suppose you have a professional boxer. He's five-ten and his natural body type is such that he has always fought at the lightweight (135 lb), super lightweight or junior welterweight (140 lb), or, at most occasionally the welterweight (147 lb).

This fighter has had a long career, in both the amateurs and the pros. Golden Gloves champion, the whole routine. Having started in the pros as a young man in his early twenties, he has fought forty or fifty professional bouts and beaten everybody of significance. He's won several titles.

Now he is bored, not quite ready to retire. But he's tired of beating on this latest string of club fighters and journeymen they are now putting before him.

Suddenly our friend, let's call him Murray, becomes aware of a fighter everybody is saying is the next great thing. Sports writers and commentators are tripping over themselves praising him - let's call him Brotherman. They say Brotherman hits like George Foreman and dances like Fred Astaire, and so forth.

Brotherman has just won the undisputed cruiserweight (195 lb) title. People are saying that Brotherman might very well be the "best fighter pound-for-pound." Every professional boxer wants to be considered the best pound-for-pound.

Murray becomes a bit miffed at this. What about him? What about all he's accomplished? Why, he put the lightweight division on the map. And yet, he is intrigued at the same time.

Murray checks out Brotherman. Murray admits that the Brotherman is good; however Murray is sure he can take him. Brotherman is the only challenge still worthy of Murray's talents. Knocking out Brotherman and taking his cruiserweight unified title represents the biggest payday he will ever have. Even if he loses... but Murray won't lose, of course.

The deal is made and Murray starts training and packing on the pounds. The day of the fight comes and Murray drags a body that is more than fifty pounds heavier than he's ever been in his life to the center of the ring to stare at his opponent, Brotherman, who is looking down at him from an advantage of four inches, at six-two, looking comfortable at a chiseled 207 punds.

Murray acquits himself skillfully and courageously. But he's beaten decisively over nine rounds before Brotherman takes him out of the fight by landing a sinister left hook to the ribs.

Murray is on the canvass. Beating the count of ten is the least of his cares. He's just hoping his lungs don't explode.

Many things may be said in the post mortem of the fight.

Murray was a game one
... but he just couldn't match the strength of Brotherman
maybe he took the fight too fast
Murray's conditioning wasn't where it should have been
Murray bobbed when he should have weaved
Murray didn't do this, he didn't do that
maybe Murray was getting too old for this business
he is thirty-four, after all
at the end of the day, he was a "bloated lightweight."

A bloated lightweight, whose "eyes were bigger than his stomach," who "bit off more than he could chew.

1) Fussell, Paul. Class. p.130

2) ibid

3) Fussell, Paul. p.131

4) Fussell, Paul. p.135

Let's go to a part three.

wingedcentaur

2010-05-09T16:01:00.000-07:00

Good Evening Friends,

I want to talk about something I learned just a few weeks ago. This is one of those things that appear to be a revelation at the time, but feel absurdly obvious when you think about it. I want to talk about the education bubble of the 1960s.

There seem to have been at least two sources of this bubble, the G.I. Bill of the 1940s (1) and the policies of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations (2).

We should start by taking a look at how words can lose their meaning and become devalued over time. One of the words that became degraded, after the 1960s, according to Paul Fussell, was 'institute.' In his book Class: A Guide through the American Status System (1983) he wrote: "You can estimate the current prestige of the higher-educational establishment by considering the way everyone wants to imitate it. When an institution devoted to profit or deception or huckstering wants to elevate its status, it pretends to be a university" (3).

Fussell called out the New York Times, with its pretentious "Weekly News Quiz," as if it were an educational institution. Brokerage firms and real estate "rackets" conduct(ed) so-called seminars (4). Indeed, "[t]he most naked lobbies in Washington, those most deeply dyed in the practices of bribery and coercion, like to call themselves institutes, as if they were the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton or the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennslyvania" (5).

By the time Fussell published his book there was the Tobacco Institute, The Alcoholic Beverage Institute, the Institute of Shortening and Edible Oils, and so forth. Some of these institutes had "professorships" and "chairs" (6).

"The lust of all classes to acquire status by attaching themselves to universities, learned societies, "science," and the like - anything but commerce and manufacturing and "marketing" - can be seen in the way, for example, the Morgan Library attracts contributors of money by designating them not Donors or Benefactors, but "Fellows" (7).

I want to remind you of three things in looking at this quote:

A) the lust of all classes... We talked about the universal tendency of class mimicry. Man is the desire to become God.

B) anything but commerce and manufacturing and "marketing." The tendency of business to run away from commerce and manufacturing in their public relations, is, as we have said, but symptomatic of capitalism's (as the latest expression of elite wealth accumulation) tendency to remove itself, more and more, from production. This has to do with the New Money/Old Money dynamic.

C) The desire of big business to "market" itself as something other than it is, as "educational institutions," is something already familiar to us from The Godfather, in which Vito Corleone expressed his desire to turn his "family" into a modern, legal, corporate entity with lawyers, each of who could "steal more money with a briefcase than a thousand men with guns and masks." This is also familiar to us from the analysis of capitalism today offered by Naomi Klein in her book, NoLogo.

From the tenth anniversay edition of her book, we learned the story of how the makers of Altoids spent 250 thousand dollars to buy some artwork by several emerging artists. Remember, they put on their own event called the "Curiously Strong Collection"? We were told what was involved in this, the desire that we "become collectively convinced not that corporations are hitching a ride on our cultural and communal activities, but that creativity and congregation would be impossible without their generosity" (p.35). I also had said that as a candy maker, the executives their probably got to thinking there has to be more than this. Candy doesn't make the world go around.

I'll continue in another post.

wingedcentaur

1) Fussell, Paul. Class: A Guide Through the American Status System. Summit Books. New York, 1983. p.136

2) ibid, p.135

3)pp.128-129

4)p.129

5)p.129

6)p.129

7)p.129

2010-04-28T09:17:00.000-07:00

Good Morning Friends,

There is another anthropological observation of the bourgeoisie, which, I think helps to account for what are called the "contradictions-in-capitalism." This observation comes from the areas of architecture and interior design. This is important to keep in mind as we talk about capitalism's tendency to "binge and purge" of overaccumulation and subsequent deindustrialization.

Various observations led us to the conclusion that the capitalist class, here and everywhere (left to themselves), are only ever interested in a minimal level of production upon which they can build their pyramids of financial speculation; and we talked about the underlying ideological reason for this: Man is the Desire to Become God - who owns all wealth not thorugh striving but merely by being "God."

The observation we shall make points to a seemingly strange relationship the bourgeoisie has to modernity, which as we will see, has implications for production and "progress" in society.

In his useful book, Class: A Guide Through the American Status System (1983), Paul Fussell cited an authority called Russell Lynes - who wrote in his book, The Tastemakers:

"...despite the facade of modernity a corporation erects to impress the proles (1), behind the scenes the upper business classes cleave to flagrantly archaic effects" (2). Interesting usage there, "flagrantly archaic."

Lynes continued, "...the sheer glass box that sits handsomely on Park Avenue to house the offices of Lever Brothers, you will find that the higher the echelon the more old fashioned the surroundings. The public front is one of daring modernity. The offices of the clerks and department managers are in the functional tradition. But when you reach the offices of top management you will find that there are open fireplaces and chandeliers with an Early American flavor... If you will visit the executive dining room of the J. Walter Thompson Company... you will find yourself in what appears to be a Cape Cod house furnished with Windsor chairs and rag rugs. It has casement windows" (3).

Conclusion: the bourgeoisie - and this is one of my take aways from Paul Fussell's book, whether he meant to convey this specific message or not - as a class, are only ever interested in engaging modernity to the extent that they can use it as a time machine by which they can propel themselves into and maintain themselves in the past. Yes, the past.

Fussell's book looked at class as distinct social and cultural systems, with ingrained patterns of thought, behavior, style, taste, manner of speaking, that remain more or less constant from birth until death. One point he made about class, is that it is not about wealth in absolute terms. Indeed, we have said that becoming Old Money is not about having absolutely the most wealth, but having it arranged for the benefit of your family, on a seemingly automatic, magically self-sustaining basis.

Fussell recognized nine classes: top out-of-sight, upper, upper-middle, middle, high proletarian (he believed the inflationary period of the 1960s and 1970s wiped out the true lower middle class), mid-proletarian, low proletarian, destitute, and bottom out-of-sight.

The upper classes love the old. We all do to a certain extent, of course, and we all use modern technology to transport us to the past [think about how modern camera technology is used to digitally remaster old black and white movies, and digitize and electronically store family photos, and so forth]. We are interested in the way the ruling class uses modernity as a platform to fuel their God-drive to stay in the past; and the contradictory impulses that become embedded in capitalism itself.

The first principle, Man is the Desire to Become God, is operative. "God" is said to be eternal, changeless, perfectly serene. The world changes but the Almighty God remains constant. Indeed, I think that deep down, in the collective unconscious, if you will, of the bourgeoisie, they see "progress" as a kind of weakness, since it is ungodlike.

To continue, Fussell made the point that, if one has to work as a salesman (remember the traditional disdain that the elites have always had for the merchant class) it is better to sell old, archaic things: real wine, unpasteurized cheese, bread without preservatives, Renaissance art objects, or rare books (4).

Indeed, according to Fussell, "[s]elling something old,..., almost redeems the class shame of selling anything at all" (5). Furthermore, "[i]t is in part because Britain has seen better days that Anglophilia is so indispensable an element in upper class taste, in clothes, literature, allusion, manners, and ceremony" (6).

Fussell said that this was why riding lessons were/and still are so cherished among the top classes, because the socially best outfits and accessories were imported from England. In addition to this, top class food was "bland and mushy, with little taste and no chances taken" (7).

There is one more idea I want to leave you with. Fussell pointed out that among the upper classes, it was considered bad form to give them compliments. Fussell wrote:

"It is among members of the upper class that you have to refrain from uttering compliments, which are taken to be rude, possessions there being of course beautiful, expensive, and impressive, without question. They paying of compliments is a middle class convention, for this class needs the assurance compliments provide" (8).

The assurance compliments provide.

I raise this point for two reasons.

A) The first principle, Man is the Desire to Become God, is operative. The further up your position is on the socioeconomic scale, the more and more you are removed from the view, as well as need and desire for the "assurance" (or 'justification' remember that word? [Man exists without justification] of the majority of the population.

B) We might draw a connectrion between this seemingly innocent idiosyncracy of the bourgeoisie and the fact that both major parties, Democrats and Republicans are largely unresponsive to the wishes of the vast majority of the people (9). For example, once again, just consider how Mayor Bloomberg and others in the city council, unimpressed with two public referenda to the contrary, went ahead and changed the law allowing them to supercede term limits voted for by the public.

Fussell gave an amusing anecdote about a British peer of a very old family. One day he invited "an artistic young man" over to his estate. Upon entering the house the young man declared that he had never seen a finer set of Hepplewhite chairs. The lord had the artist removed immediately, saying, "Fellow praised my chairs! Damned cheek!" (10).

What is going on here?

The peer took the compliment (especially coming from the source) as an insult. This is because the compliment itself suggested that the peer was not sufficiently high above the rest of humanity, such that praise or condemnation is only credible coming from "God" (this is so whether or not this peer was a nominal believer or not).

There is an in-built class barrier in political communication between the population (11).

wingedcentaur

1. 'proles' is short for proletarian.

2. Fussel, Paul. Class: A Guide Through the American Status System. Summit Books, New York, 1983. p.72

3. ibid, pp.72-73

4. Fussell, p.73

5. ibid.

6. ibid.

7. Fussell, P. p.73

8. Fusell, Paul. Class. p.32

9. I use as my authority, Noam Chomsky, who always says that both the Democratic and Republican parties have been well to the right of the public on a host of issues, especially on healthcare, for decades, according to polling data he is familiar. He brings up this point on almost any speech readily available on the Internet, when he discusses the domestic American political system. There an interview he gave on a show called Inside U.S.A, in which he makes this point.

10. Fussell, Paul. Class: A Guide Through the American Status System. p.32

11. See footnote #9

2010-04-25T04:59:00.000-07:00

Good Morning Friends,

Today we're talking about finance (as an organism) likened to an alien, intelligent, slug-like creature that needs to move from host to host, to survive; and, you may remember, it is our intention to do our best to evaluate this in terms of what I would call a left libertarian (in the American sense of the word 'libertarian,' let us be clear) analysis that believes that, what they call the financial oligarchy, wants to create a world government.

We said before that there is much science fiction about an intelligent slug-like creatures inhabiting humanoid bodies. Think about Star Trek Deep Space Nine, Jadzia Dax is a Trill (humanoid species of the planet Trill) who was one of the lucky ones to get her own symbiot called Dax, a species of incredibly long-lived, sentient slug creature. There's the Stargate series featuring the Tokkra and Go'ould.

But there are also stories in which the slug creatures give superhuman strength and speed to the humanoid host. It does this by making the nervous system and metabolism work in a different way, somehow. I believe there was an episode of the original Star Trek (with William Shatner as Captain James T. Kirk) with this feature.

In this way, finance can make an economy unusually dynamic and strong, even while it undermines the internal health of the same economy. I suggested that there is a difference between a strong and dynamic economy and a healthy one. An economy can be strong but internally unhealthy. I gave as examples of this ill health but outward strength, in the form of the breaking of the levvies in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina hit and the bridge collapse in Minnesota. The bones of the state had been weakened at the expense of profit making.

Think about an NFL player, a great mountain of a man who also uses steroids* with all the short-term benefits that come with their use. Indeed, his musculature makes him appear to be the "picture of health," but the steroids are undermining his kidneys, changing his hormones, and so forth.

The thing about these slug creatures is that they are parasites. Yes, they endow their hosts with superhuman capabilities, but they simultaneosly drain the body's resources in order to produce those results. Because of this the slug cannot remain in one body for very long, nothing like a natural life-span. It has to keep moving from host to host to host and so on and so forth.

I also mentioned that there are two novels by Octavia E. Butler, "Wildseed" and "Mind of My Mind" which feature a character called Doro, who is something like this but not precisely but similar.

We also found useful, an article in the Monthly Review by John Bellamy Foster called The Age of Monopoly-Finance Capital. monthlyreview.org/100201/foster.php

It just occurred to me that capitalism can be thought of as a kind of manic-depressive system. Keeping in mind the bubble-making nature of capitalism (the euphoria phase) - for our own edification - Foster wrote:

"Economic stagnation, in this sense, should not be confused with technological or consumer product stagnation. Indeed, the constant development of the technology of production that characterizes capitalism in general (including its monopoly stage) only increases the productive potential of the system, intensifying its overaccumulation tendencies.** The system could conceivably be rescued from its economic doldrums under these circumstances by the appearance of an epoch-making innovation on the scale of the steam engine, the railroad, and the automobile, in terms of total economic-geographical effects - generating a vast demand for new investment, independent of existing income constraints. Yet no such epoch-making innovation, Baran and Sweezy (two writers whose work Foster referred to) argued, was on the horizon."

Where can new dynamism come from? What is there to bubble? If there is nothing, what then? What will American finance do then? Where will they go? I am making a shaky assumption that Foster is talking about American finance capital, which of course, is a part of global finance capital, by his mention of the steam engine, automobile, and railroad.

From this narrow perspective, if we were to evaluate what left libertarians (don't accept this term as gospel; it's rather thrown together) call the New World Order (which is different from what they seem to think that mainstream politicians pretend to mean by it), which is, according to left libertarians, sovereignty killing world government, in terms of a parasitical slug, then the question would be: where can American finance move to?

This is a nonsensical question. There is no other single country which American finance could move to - even if such a thing were possible - that provides any better prospects for dynamic innovation.

For this reason, left libertarians might argue, the financial oligarchy needs to feast on whole blocks of nations. The Alex Jones documentary Fall of the Republic talks about this. The film speaks of plans for a North American Union, the complete political and economic fusion of Canada, the United States, and Mexico, and NAFTA as a first step to this.

Fall of the Republic sees the ultimate goal of the international bankers as complete world fusion, which from the perspective of parasitical slugs, might provide the ultimate body for the organism to be able to live on forever.

One way we might think about this is Brainiac. Brainiac is the arch-nemesis of Superman (next to Lex Luthor). Brainiac was the living computer of the planet Krypton, who deliberately allowed the destruction of the planet. His twisted justification for this: the more rare knowledge is, the more precious it is. One of the things he always does is to make newer, stronger bodies to house his intellect.

Or we might think about the thirties radio play "Donovan's Brain" starring Orson Welles [Donovan's Brain was an episode of a radio mystery anthology series called Suspense that ran from 1930 to 1960], which was based on a novel by a writer called Kurt Siodmak. William H. Donovan was critically injured in an airplane crash. Patrick Curry was a surgeon obsessed with keeping disembodied brains alive for as long as possible.

Donovan comes into his hands, and Curry decides that the mistake he's made before was that his previous subjects had been dead at the time of the removal of the brain. This is a mistake he intends not to make again, and so on and so forth.

Curry's treatments of the brain, both to keep it alive and develop a means of communication with it, awaken its self-consciousness and confer upon the brain extraordinary telepathic powers. The brain now wants a body, a young and strong body in which to house itself, so that the brain that was once William H. Donovan (and which is now much more) can live on, potentially for thousands of years. And then Donovan's Brain might go on to take over and rule the world.

So, the potential designs of the American branch of the global financial oligarchy might be compared to Donvan's Brain. The world would be the ultimate body.

But it seems to me that finance already has the benefits of global access with the way the world is now, with over a trillion dollars a day of financial capital moving all about the world at the speed the Internet.

It is called a virtual parliament or virtual senate (1).

As Marx said that capitalism only exists as a part of many capitalisms, I would say that world governments can only exist within a framework of many world governments - other all-encompassing planetary governments. I'm being serious about this. I think we can thankful that the international bankers are not going for world government, simply because we seem to be alone as sentient life in this solar system, and as far as we know, the galaxy; otherwise I think it credible that the international banker set might well move to cohere the Earth into a unified structure under their outright control, as a base from which to launch an interplanetary venture of financial imperialism; and to the extent to which imperialism abroad depends upon repression at "home" we can be thankful that we, the people of the Earth, are spared this additional dimension of suffering.

wingedcentaur

2010-04-23T18:49:00.000-07:00

Good Evening Friends,

Believe me, I didn't want to do this. I tried my best to avoid it. I'd give all the change in my pockets not to have to do this. But it simply can't be avoided.

Later on we're going to have to talk about reason. What is reason? Do human beings actually have reason? If not, can we acquire reason?

We shan't use an elaborate definition of reason. We are going to define the term like this...
Reason: the characteristic of being both persuasive and persuadable. There must exist the possiblity of being persuaded (not on the basis of "facts," necessarily because there is so little agreement, oftentimes, about what a fact is [we're talking about social reality]; but rather we will be concerned with what I shall call patterns of experienced social reality by the variously disadvantaged social and economic groups, suggesting, of course, that there is something wrong with the social reality.

In addressing the question of whether or not human beings have reason, we are going to think about how "paradigm shifts" occur. I doubt we'll actually be able to answer the question. But then again, who knows? Insight may come from surprising places. Perhaps the Democratic pollster, Mark Penn, with his theories of "micro-trends," may be of assistance to us. You never can tell.

As we do this you should also keep in mind the remarks I cited from a Noam Chomsky book, which cited the remarks of Nobel Prize-winning economist, Paul Krugman - who talked about how economic orthodoxy is created. Conventional wisdom is not stable, he said, but rather like that of a herd mentality.

The question we'll have to pose is: Do human beings, in general, achieve their worldview by thinking or reacting (being "reactionary," which I will argue is a synonym for reflexive, automatic class solidarity of the bourgeoisie. This is an area of inquiry we might call moral philosophy, I suppose.There is a related matter that come from legal philosophy.

The question we will ask is: What is stealing?

Friends, if I've said this once, I've said it a thousand times... In the glorious novel, The Godfather by the immortal Mario Puzo, Godfather Corleone said to his son, Santino, "A lawyer can steal more money with a briefcase than a thousand men with guns and masks." And in Puzo's novel, The Last Don, Don Clericuzio sent his eldest son, Giorgio, to a fancy high-priced business school with the expressed purpose of learning the intricacies of stealing money while staying within the confines of the law.

To what extent is capitalism a system of lawyers stealing money with briefcases? Is this what David Harvey calls "accumulation by dispossession?"

You know, pre-Castro Cuba under Batista should be considered every bit as much a "neoliberal" project as Chile under Pinochet in the seventies. T.J. English wrote an excellent book on this called Havana Nocturne: How the Mob owned Cuba... and Then Lost It to the Revolution (2007, 2008).

Under the heading of what can only be called "It Takes One to Know One," English wrote:

In the early thirties " A new kind of Mob was born, based more on the philosophy of robber barrons like Cornelius Vanderbuilt, J.P. Morgan, Henry Ford, and the Rockefellers than on rural Mafia societies back in Sicily. Luciano, Lansky, and a few others in New York were seen as the masterminds of this dramatic new direction and were therefore established as prominent members of the Commission, a governing body composed of like-minded Mob leaders from Chicago, Cleveland, Kansas City, Philadelphia, Boston, New Orleans, and just about anywhere else where the American underworld enforced its will" (English, T.J. Havana Nocturne. p.15).

Suggested translation: The Mafia modeled themselves on the "robber barrons," like Ford and the rest of them, because the former (the Mob) thought the latter ("robber barron") were better thieves than they were, because the big industrialists had the aura of legality around themselves. They were part of the system.

Good Night,

wingedcentaur

By the way, we'll pick up with finance as an organism likened to an alien, intelligent slug-like creature that moves from host to host, next time.

2010-04-22T09:29:00.000-07:00

Finance as Metabolism.

We also talked about finance's relationship to the real economy, as analagous to the metabolism's relationship to the body. The metabolism is the mechanism by which the body converts nutrients into energy.

The same is true of finance, which is the metabolism of the body of the real economy. Credit allows capitalist enterprises to function and carry out its various projects; as well as individuals who buy homes and fill them with families; buy cars, which they drive to work; and start their own small businesses. And so on and so forth.

When the quality and/or quantity of nutrient input is restricted, the metabolism has to work much harder to extract anything of value to keep the body going. The same is so with finance. When there is deindustrialization, and the mass unemployment and casualization of labor, and the downward pressure on wages (coupled with the fact that real wages stopped growing since the seventies), and you have finance having to worker harder and more "creatively." This may include coming at new ways to look at people previously seen as not creditworthy in traditional terms, as ideal borrowers for sub-prime home loans.

wingedcentaur

2010-04-22T05:09:00.000-07:00

Good Morning Friends,

Many, many, many posts ago, we started to look at different ways that finance - as an organism - could be viewed. I said that finance seems to stimulate the anorexia/bulimic cycle.

Bulimia: Capitalism tends to "binge and purge." The "next big thing" (also known as the latest bubble) comes along and capitalism goes crazy. But understand what is involved. The goal of capitalists, here, is always to expand as massively, as quickly as possible so that they can actually grow out of the system. Remember, they view capitalism as an inferior state of existence. The New Money/Old Money dynamic is involved here, and all that goes with it.

Individuals afflicted with the condition of bulimia, binge and purge. They over eat and then throw up. I think I heard, somewhere, that this process brings up stomach acid that eats away at the lining of the throat, and so forth. Capitalism, I suggested, behaves precisely this way.

What is happening, psychologically, with someone afflicted with bulimia? Let me hasten to say that I do not have firsthand knowledge. I don't think I have ever consciously known a person with this condition. I hope I do not give offense, but clearly what is involved is that a bulimic desires to have the benefit of eating large quantitities of rich foods he enjoys. But on one level he is motivated by an irrational fear of gaining weight, so he throws up.

With capitalism the "binge" (or bubble) can be anything: railroads, automobiles, planes, the electric light bulb, computers and the Internet, housing.... anything. Everybody gets hysterical and enormous industrial capacity is built up to take advantage of the opportunity presented. For a while, things are relatively good for a relatively broad sector of society. But then capitalism hits the wall of overproduction - not from a perspective of social need, of course, but from the perspective that the capitalists eventually run out of paying customers.

Then the deindustrialization (the purge) goes into effect. Productive capacity is sent abroad in search of cheaper, or more "flexible" labor markets, and so forth. The capitalist class also put downward pressure on workers wages and benefits. The capitalist class always claims this is necessary to remain competitive with foreign industry and so forth. But remember, the finance and investment sector have benefitted enormously and come through the "purging" process, almost invariably, unscathed.

All of this is true enough, but I speculated that there is something else involved. Here, we should remember that finance is a process as well as a thing. Industrial firms, as well as financial institutions, engage in finance.

Why did "[m]aking things [become] unfashionable, as Wall Street Journal reported in a November 1999 front page article[?] For example, "Enron, the Houston-based energy firm, financialized itself into a company that traded energy like stock options, becoming '"more akin to Goldman Sachs than to Consolidated Edison"' (Phillips, Kevin. Wealth and Democracy. 2002. pp. 143-144).

Why did this happen?

I suggested that there were limits to what "immediately available rationality" (1) can tell us. As I mentioned, it seems to me that capitalism only ever wants just enough real production - just enough - upon which they can build their complexes of speculation. We said that financialization was a process by which New Money attempts to become Old Money. It is not entirely about increasing their wealth in absolute terms, but in putting their wealth on a seemingly self-sustaining, God-like basis. They want just enough real production for this, and the rest is fat to be shed.

What about the collapsed automotive industry of America?

Many commentators have made the observation that the auto plants could be remade into building something else for social need, namely high-speed rail and so forth. Why is it that the American ruling class have no enthusiasm for this? Why was the Secretary of Transportation, Ray Lahood, going abroad to give out contracts to do this (2)?

Two things. I suggested that bourgeoisie class solidarity, in domestic terms, was indeed operative with the stance both the Bush and Obama administrations took with respect to the ailing financial sector and the ailing automotive sector. They rushed in to rescue the former and basically said of the latter: Let them eat cake!

But remember, finance is a process as well as a thing. And industrial corporations have (perhaps always have) engaged in finance - that is, the executive layer of these corporations, of course.

Take Ford Motor Corporation. Suppose it had gone permanently bust, liquidated and so forth. Ford had (I would imagine still has) the "Ford Credit Corporation, heavily involved in global hedging" (Phillips, Kevin. Wealth and Democracy. 2002. p.143).

I suggested that the finance arm of the Ford organization represented an escape hatch for the executive layer, while workers are left bewildered, on the unemployment line, and sometimes left desperately grasping at panaceas like "retraining," and the like.

So, when the bubble pops, there comes the anorexia cycle. The system looks at itself in the mirror and says "I'm too fat," and places the society on an austerity regimen, namely, draconian cuts in social spending. As with the anorexic individual intake (or production itself) is severely restricted, as punishing "fat" trimming measures proceed.

In this way working people are pauperized, and have to resort to increased borrowing to keep the consumption going. It is upon this increased borrowing that the capitalists can and do build their complexes of speculation. And here we have a core ingredient of the sub-prime housing debacle.

1) Even from the point of view of capitalism itself, doesn't this realization underpin the whole field of what is called "behavioral economics?"

2) I cited an article about the Transportation Secretary going abroad looking to hand out contracts to foreign firms to build a high-speed rail in America. China particularly interested me. Remember, there comes a point in global capitalist competition in which a reverse competition occurs: Which bourgeoisie society can benefit the most from the least involvement with production?

I went on to counterintuitively infer that this solicitation is an attack on the vanity of the Chinese bourgeoisie by the American bourgeoisie, in two ways. First is the reverse competition dynamic I already alluded to.

The second. As I said, the Chinese were one of the exploited groups who helped build the railroads in America in the nineteenth century. I suggested that for actually racist elements of the American bourgeoisie, this would represent a marvelous symmetry, a completion of the circle. They would not view this as China "pulling ahead" of the United States in terms of transportation technology and so forth; because leading world economic powers who globalize (largely renounce manufacturing in favoring of getting these needed and desired goods from other countries) tend to reduce the world or large parts of the world to a servant status.

I said that the Chinese bourgeoisie must know this. This is why I said that if Chinese firms were to get the contracts to build the high-speed rail in the United States, we should look for massive subcontracting. Indeed, they would want to put an "American face" on the enterprise, in effect, to kind of partially deflect the insult back at the American bourgeoisie. We would not look for these firms to attempt to bring over large numbers of Chinese workers. But note this, Chinese firms would subcontract out the jobs while profiting from them.

Quite the opposite happened in Iraq. After the American invasion in 2003, U.S. firms went in to do reconstruction work. But very few Iraqis were hired, if you remember. American firms imported large numbers of foreign workers.

Why?

I would suggest this is because the American ruling class was not in "competition" with the Iraqi bourgeoisie, elements of which had advocated for the invasion. The Iraqi bourgeoisie was also largely scattered by Paul Bremmer's implementation of the "de-Baathification" process.

When American firms with American personnel went over to Iraq, what happened?

There was a barrage of succesive scandals of war profiteering. Leaving aside the "no-bid" contracts and all the rest of it, those firms basically just did not do the work they contracted to do, while profitting enormously anyway.

Take a look at two documentaries that are available to be viewed in full, online: "The New American Century" and "Iraq for Sale." Apparently, the U.S. government had a policy of "cost-plus" with regard to these firms. This was a financial formula which guareented a profit for these firms.

These firms, in Iraq, spent millions of American taxpayer dollars on luxury consumption. Cost-plus also encouraged. For example, if you receive an eighty thousand dollar truck without an oil filter, you don't try to get an oil filter. No, you blow up the truck and order another truck.

Is this corruption? Yes and no. But it just shows that capitalism itself tends away from production. All it wants is enough upon which to build their speculation upon speculation on.

wingedcentaur

2010-04-19T18:54:00.000-07:00

Good Evening Friends,

You know, I was wondering something. Remember I made reference to the relatively new form of offshoring, Naomi Klein makes us aware of, which I called "ghost" factories? What is the relationship, if any, of these spirit workshops to the financial structure called "micro-credit?"

I could be wrong, but I suspect that these financial structures enable - perhaps unintentionally but nevertheless inevitably - the God-fantasies of the multinational corporations, in that they make the ghost factories possible. If you're a CEO of a multinational, having a ghost factory is great. No carbon footprint is traceable to you; and no "sweatshop" working conditions are traceable you either, why, people are just leisurely "working from home;" and, more than ever before, the products you want to sell, appear to materialize out of thin air - at your command. Man is the desire to become God.

Now, I think it will take a real effort of economic anthropology to make the relationship clear. But here's what I was thinking. You know how, in the advanced capitalist world, millions of people work for different companies - and every once in a while, someone leaves their company to start their own firm? They develop a business plan, a proposal to pitch to a bank in application for a loan....

It is my understanding that recipients of micro-credit loans are people living in the developing world. Do the recipients of these loans also tend to be former employees of these ghost factories?

If that is so, then we can see why capitalism is so tenacious, durable, and adaptable. This would be - if my understanding is correct - what Slavoj Zizek calls the "chocolate laxative" effect; because capitalism takes with one hand and gives with the other - or at least appears to. Some people say that God is a lot like that.

Lastly, if one argues against globalization (really, capitalism itself), there is a counter-argument people can make against you: that you are against "progress" ( a problematic word and concept, which we may discuss at another time).

wingedcentaur

2010-04-18T05:38:00.000-07:00

Good Morning Friends,

Some of you might think my analysis of the economy bizarre. That's understandable.

But I would point out much about economic growth is unknown. Noam Chomsky cited economist Paul Krugman, from a publication of the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London, in which Krugman made five basic points (Chomsky, Noam. Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order. Seven Stories Press. New York, Toronto, London, 1999. p.25).

Krugman's five basic points.

1) Knowledge about U.S. economic development is very limited. For the U.S., two-thirds of the rise of per capita income is unexplained..... (certainly as of 1999).

2) Conclusions with little basis are constantly being put forward to provide doctrinal support for policy.

3) "Conventional wisdom" is unstable, regularly shifting to something else, perhaps the opposite of the latest phase, though its proponents are again full of confidence as they impose the new orthodoxy.

4) In retrospect, it is commonly agreed that they economic development policies did not "serve their expressed goals and were based on "bad ideas."

5) "Bad ideas" flourish because they serve the interests of powerful groups.

So, again, there are limits to immediately available rationality. As we saw, for example, with the case study of Sara Lee in the late nineties, ".. Wall Street,..., is guided by spiritual goals as well as economic ones" (Klein, Naomi. NoLogo. 2000, 2002. p.199).

I want to say a word about dialectical materialism or dialectical determinism. Anyway, dm is an approach to studying history that gives primacy to the means of production and changing means of production. And this analysis sees the means of production as central to informing the political, economic, social, legal, philosophical, artistic, and perhaps even scientific life of a given society. Politics, economics, social customs, law, art, and science do not arise independently of the dominant means of production.

I imagine the main objection to this is that dialectical materialism seems to reduce human motives to the crass material, potentially offering a rather robotic view of humanity. This is a wrong path it can take. But as I have been trying to show: materialism is not just materialism; money is not just money; and wealth is not just wealth. These things are for us, all of us to greater and lesser degrees, symbolic in this respect, to our nearness to "God." Man is the desire to become God. Money has spiritual ideology bound up within it, which is the invisible or real "virtual" source of its value.

I'll say a little bit more about this later.

wingedcentaur

2010-04-17T15:20:00.000-07:00

Good Evening Friends,

As I say, my starting point for the reflections in this blog is: Man is the desire to become God - as Jean-Paul Sartre informed us. I think we're quite right to invoke "God," due to the literally astronomical sums of money handeled by global financial and investor sector.

You may have heard that the U.S. government committed 23.7 trillion dollars to reconstitute the American finance sector. And remember when I told you how, by 1995 trading volume on global financial transactions had come to over a trillion dollars a day?

Did you know that a trillion, the quantity of one trillion is one hundred times the age of the universe (1)?

Let me just very, very briefly pick up the thread from yesterday. In the 1980s there was a pop group, a sibling act called The Jets, and one of their greatest hits was a tune called Rocket 2 U. The song is about a young man whose girlfriend has taken to treating him like her guy Friday. It seems she is constantly calling him up, asking him to come over and tend to various utilitarian matters: her pipes in her kitchen sink might be clogged up; her car won't start; the cabinet door creaks; her cat is stuck up a tree, and so forth.

In other words, the young lady in question, is treating the protagonist of this story like an instrument, a tool. She is objectifying him. The young man singing the song is pleading with her to understand that he is not her handyman, but one thing he can do is "Rocket 2 U, baby."

I was saying yesterday that globalization, always started by leading world economic powers, creates this very dynamic. What we call globalization is a way of a leading world economic power to say to the rest of the world: "You grow it for us. You make it for us. You fix it for us. You do all the mundane little things that we, in our serene majesty, simply cannot be bothered with. We'll do the thinking, planning the global order." Remember the connection we made to rich individuals and their addiction to services, paying to have people tend to them in every conceivable way - which is a mark of social status far more so, these days, than the clothes you wear of the gadgets in your utility belt.

This is why I said that capitalism actually undermines international relations in a subtle way. The New Money/Old Money dynamic is always at work to drive the system away from production. We talked about this, but basically the world's bourgeoisie come to a point when they treat productive capacity like a hot potato. Remember the game "hot potato?"

Oh, and I wanted to mention this. What do we hear concerning countries of the developing world, with respect to the global order? They want a "seat at the table." What is this "table?" It is the proverbial and real conference table around which sits the most important countries plan the galactic order for the next few years. This evoked desire to have a "seat at the table" is an expression of the desire to graduate from the perceived status of objectified handyman to global thinker on par with the other important powers. I suppose they need to become "knowledge-based" societies as quickly as possible.

Friends, isn't global warming also a factor? One can see how the idea of anthropocentric climate change might also give an impetus to deindustrialize - which is what the capitalist ruling class want to do anyway (2). If we are warming the planet through burning fossil fuels and by our methods of production in general, why then, we just have to cut back dramatically on nasty factories and such.

We might note, here, that Naomi Klein identified another form of offshoring. She wrote:

"For some corporations a plant closure is still a straightforward decision to move the same facility to a cheaper locale. But for others - particularly those with strong brand identities like Levi Strauss and Hanes - layoffs are only the most visible manifestation of a much more fundamental shift: one that is less about where to produce than how. Unlike the factories that hop from one place to another, these factories will never rematerialize - Mid-flight, they morph into something else entirely: "orders" to be placed with a contractor, who - may well turn over those orders to as many as ten subcontractors, who - particularly in the garmet sector - may in turn pass a portion of the subcontracts on to a network of home workers who will complete the jobs in basements and living rooms" (Klein, Naomi. NoLogo. Picador. New York, 2000, 2002. p.201).

Note this, friends, and note this very carefully. First, in this way, multinational corporation x seems to have completely relieved itself of its "carbon footprint." Second, this highly diffuse and dispersed, yet controlled production network seems to come as close as the laws of physics will allow, to the effect of the products they want to sell, appearing out of the air, by magic (a fantasy no doubt many such "green" CEOs indulge in, for Man is the Desire to Become God, as I may have mentioned once or twice).

This is an amazing thing when you think about it. I'm being quite serious. Consider it, a factory disappears from the face of the Earth, and yet its production activity continues - the very factory that disappeared. What does this remind you of?

It reminds me of an amputee who intially claims to be able to still feel his missing limb.

Just a disgusting, but I hope, amusing sidenote from the world of literature. In Clive Barker's novel, The Great and Secret Show, the psychopathic antihero encountered an old man who was an amputee. The man claimed to be able to feel the missing limb, years after he lost it. Not only that but he said that he could still jerk off with it, the "ghost" limb. He did so in demonstration for our protagonist.

Anyway, back to the factory. This might be what Slavoj Zizek calls the reality of the virtual (you should see this seven part video of this title, The Reality of the Virtual, on YouTube). The idea is that things that are not fully actualized in the physical world, nevertheless, having efficacious impact in the real world, and indeed, something must be virtual to be effective in the real world. And so on and so forth. Watch the video, it's fascinating.

In any event, global warming is a concern of the liberal wing of the bourgeoisie, not the conservative wing, broadly speaking. Despite their rhetorical and doctrinal differences on the subject, this does not alter their behavior as a class. The tendency is always to turn away from production.

Remember, "Instead of seeking to restore the older manufacturing industries or build the new technological sector, Washington authorities steadily protected and advanced banking and finance, providing rescues from perils, insolvencies, and crises hitherto regarded as being hazards of the marketplace. The continual eminence of both the treasury and the Federal Reserve furnished a central continuity between the eighties and nineties and the Republican Bush and Democratic Clinton eras. Finance was in a bipartisan catbird's seat" (Phillips, Kevin. Wealth and Democracy. p.97).

As you know, the Bush and Obama administrations rushed to rescue the financial institutions and let the auto corporations go bust. I understand they have staggered out of Chapter 11, reorganized, made public pronouncements about how they're going to make better cars, recommit to excellence and customer satisfaction, yada, yada, yada.

Some people might point to this as proof that bourgeoisie class solidarity is not operative. They'll say its not about class at all. Other people talk about how there's been a morphing of who the ruling class is - it's all about finance, legal services, and information services, and the like. I think the research we've looked at suggests that the ruling class morphs what they do but pretty much the same people stay on top.

Finance is a process not a thing or a specific group of the bourgeoisie. Industrialists, as well as bankers, practice the dark arts of finance. General Motors has GMAC, a bank or something.

General Electric sold off its consumer appliance division to emphasize huge profits of its General Electric Credit Corporation, and by 2000 GE credit banks were as far afield as the Czech Republic. Ford Motor Corporation came to rely on enormous profits from its subsidiary, Ford Credit Corporation, which was heavily involved in global hedging (Wealth and Democracy, p.143).

Now, suppose the federal government forced the Ford Motor Company into liquidation, never to be a viable organization again. Tough luck for the workers, of course. But the Ford Credit Corporation seems, to me, like an escape hatch for the executive layer. You see, elite class solidarity is still operative.

1) I heard Istvan Meszaros say that in a talk he gave called Marx and the Credit Crunch part one. He said he had asked an astrophysicist friend of his, how to put the huge numbers involving the bailout in perspective. That the quantity of one trillion is one hundred times the age of the universe, is the answer he said he was given. On YouTube.

2) The natural tendency is away from production, once enough of it is established upon which the economic elite can build their complexes of financial speculation. This is thoroughly "bipartisan." Just because "conservatives" or Republicans, on the whole, do not subscribe to global warming, this does not mean that they are, even theoretically, in favor of more domestic production. The Republican "side of the aisle," as you know, are much more interested in drilling for oil and nuclear energy, and so forth - energy not things or production necessarily. But Oil is a commodity and much investment is built upon it as a commodity (commodities trading, which is surely engaged in by brokers who are both Democrats and Republicans); but liberals still feel compelled to decry our "growing dependence on foreign oil," and so forth.

Here, we begin to learn of another operative dynamic, in which the bourgeoisie feel compelled to condemn something while at the same time benefitting dramatically from it. This principle seems to be operative in terms of undocumented Mexican workers, Iran and nuclear weapons, as well as fossil fuels. I my talk about this another time, but this is related to what Slavoj Zizek calls the "chocolate laxative" effect, or what we might think of as a splitting of the Self.

Chocolate laxative refers to the way capitalists spend the first half of the day "grabbing" all the money they can (Remember Don Corleone who said, "A lawyer can steal more money with a briefcase than a thousand men with guns and masks"), and the last half giving part of it away - charity. This is part of the logic of capitalism today, says Zizek. This is they way in which capitalism tries to redeem itself.

Chocolate - and I never knew this - is apparently identified with constipation. A laxative, well... Anyway with chocolate laxative we have something which is the antidote to itself. We are not talking about hypocrisy or insincerity at all. But I'll go into that another time.

Anyway, getting to the subject of this footnote, I want to just cite Kevin Phillips again. He identified four great engines that spurred economic growth starting in 1982, when Reagan was president (Wealth and Democracy, pp.91-92).

1) Military spending

2) Corporate investment, which was favored by the 1981 tax law. A lot of this money went into computers, but far more of it went into new office buildings and construction.

3) Debt: governments, corporations, and indivduals borrowed as never before.

4) Financial activities: mergers, leveraged buyouts, dealmaking, and steady growth of bank and investment sector employment.

Furthermore, much of the money made in this way was spent on luxury consumption or "held liquid for trading in assets rather than being invested in capital equipment for production," (Wealth and Democracy, p.92).

wingedcentaur

2010-04-16T21:03:00.000-07:00

Friends, at first capitalism engenders competition in a way we can understand rationally. It is the competition among individual capitalists for market share, and so forth. We're skipping a lot of steps, but then this competition becomes embodied in nation-states, and the economies of nation-states seem to compete with each other for global market share. At first, this competition seems to be based on the real economy.

And then (always remember the New Money/Old Money dynamic) the competition takes a strange turn. The competition among the bourgeoisie classes of the nation-states of capitalist powers seems to be: who can profit the most by having the least to do with production, the real economy?

Remember we talked about how elite education gives us some clues to deciphering the motivations and behavior of the ruling class? I said that their system of education seems to teach them two things: failure is not failure and reality is what they say it is. I gave examples and suggested a link between this and the CEO pulls down astronomical compensation that is unconnected with performance or how high officials who seem to have demonstably failed in their duties but keep resurfacing and being given more responsibility and power. I told you about a classmate of mine from Canada who started college at sixteen -he was promoted because he was failing his classes in highschool. The interpretation wasn't that he needed extra help, but that he was being bored and needed more of a challenge.

Let me give you a link socialistworker.org/2009/07/29/who-does-obama-answer-to

This is an essay by Brian Jones. He tells us that he had gone to one of the elite highschools in Ohio, on scholarship. The game was soccer. According to Mr. Jones, when they played against a public school and one of their youngsters scored a goal against Jones's school, the team of that school would chant "That's alright. That's okay. You're gonna work for us someday."

A very strange chant. What this shows is that those young soccer players barely had their minds on the game. We can say that they were completely unconcerned with "production" in terms of the score. They had their minds on, in a "mark-to-market" sort of way, on a time literally decades away.

You know, I heard the historian Webster Tarpley say - on an Alex Jones documentary called "Fall of the Republic" say that the "oligarchy," which is the term he prefers, have "values that are almost the reverse of human values." It was out of his mouth that I first heard that Fitzgerald had said to Hemmingway that the rich are different from the rest of us. Hemmingway quipped, yeah they got more money. Fitzgerald said no, it's more than that.

I'm sorry to say that I accept that view a lot more than the one that they "put their pants on one leg at at time" just like you and me. Not really.

After all, why did the Bush and Obama administrations both effectively say of the auto industry "Let them eat cake!" but rush to the aid of the financial institutions?

And in the midst of abandoned car plants in America, why is the U.S. looking to outsource the job of creating high-speed rail in this country? www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/13/us-highspeed-rail-china-t_n_497854.html

www.blnz.com/news/2009/07/15/us_looks_private_investment_highspeed_5754.html

Asian and European firms are being looked at. But the case of China interests me the most. Remember, immediately available rationality has its limits in analyzing human behavior. In addition to everything else, this solicitation of China to build our high-speed rail is an attack on the vanity of the Chinese bourgeoisie by the American bourgeoisie.

Remember, the Chinese were one of the exploited groups who helped build railroads for America in the middle of the nineteenth century. I bet there are racist elements of the American oligarchy who would get a real kick out of the symmetry. No doubt the Chinese bourgeosie know this and will engage in much subcontracting, if they get the contract.

Goodnight.

wingedcentaur

2010-04-16T20:04:00.001-07:00

To continue then,

The following are a couple of quotes we might describe as economic triumphalist poetry, which capture the "cocksure" attitude of the Spaniard and the Brit during these periods of their history in which finance dominated those economies at the expense of manufacturing.

Let London manufacture those fine fabrics... Holland her chambrays, Florence her cloth; the Indies their beaver and vicuna; Milan her brocades; Italy and Flanders their linens... so long as our capital can enjoy them. The only thing it proves is that all nations train journeymen for Madrid and that Madrid is queen of parliaments, for all the world serves her and she serves nobody (Phillips, K. Wealth and Democracy, p.195)."

We notice a couple of things. The globalizaing power, Spain here, sees its capital as commanding the "service" of "all the nations [that] trains journeymen for Madrid..." The Spanish elite clearly sees themselves in a relation of power with respect to the rest of the world that "serves her" while "she serves nobody." Furthermore, it seems as if capitalism, here, has recreated the dynamic that had been know to the ancient Near Eastern "divine" kings, who received "tribute" on a regular basis from all his vassals, allies, subjects peoples, and those nations recently conquered by the force of his arms.

Consider this. In the excellent book, Class Matters: Correspondents of the New York Times (2005), which talks about - class in America. It turns out the Times thinks there is such a thing as the class divide. Anyway, one chapter talks about the fact that the real demarcation of class involves services (products and clothes don't work so well in visually delineating who belongs to what class because of easy credit and so forth): how many people do you pay to tend to you. We're talking about use of nannies, educational tutors for the children, personal shoppers, personal assistants, pet grooming services, what have you.

The point is that the richer and more powerful one is, the less he has to do for himself. The quote we just looked at, concerning Hapsburg Spain's financialization, evokes this.

The plains of North America and Russia are our cornfields; Chicago and Odessa our granaries; Canada and the Baltic are our timber forests; Austalasia contains our sheep farms, and in Argentina and on the western praries of North America are our herds of oxen; Peru sends her silver, and the gold of South Africa and Australia flows to London; the Hindus and the Chinese grow tea for us, and our coffee, sugar, and spice plantations are all in the Indies. Spain and France are our vineyards, and the Mediterranean our fruit garden... (Phillips, K. Wealth and Democracy, pp.195-196).

We see here, a tendency on the part of the financially globalizing power, to regard land and resources sat on by other peoples as "ours." This, of course, is and has been a central ingredient for imperial adventure of capitalist powers into the developing world; and has been, and, scarily enough, possibly is in the future, an impetus for conflict between advanced capitalist powers (1).

I trust none of this is too controversial that capitalism undermines international relations, in the usual ways we're used to thinking about the matter. I want to argue that capitalism undermines international relations in a more subtle way also.

Remember how we defined globalization. It is the process that happens when the economic elite sharply reduced emphasis on manufacturing in favor of wealth creation by finance and speculative investment. If a country is not going to make certain products for themselves anymore, so much, they have to get these good from other countries with cheaper labor, of course. Hence, globalization.

American-led globalization of the last thirty-five years was, in a sense, effectively in fact, a way of America saying to the rest of the world: We'll do the thinking around here, planning the global order, keeping the galaxy in one piece and so forth. You all just make our Nike and Addidas sneakers, tennis clothes, cheap knock-off boutique brands and the like. You just make our computer chips, and so forth, and we'll do the thinking.

What happens here is that other nations and other peoples are objectified, reduced to the "dumb blonde," and children role: they are to be seen not heard. So, when productive capacity is sent from an advanced capitalist economy to a developing nation, the bourgeoisie of the latter country - paradoxically, although they are the prime beneficiaries of that country, at some level, they also see this, on an unconscious level, as a bit of an insult.

They, the bourgeoisie of the developing nation, are therefore eager to see the insult lifted as soon as possible. And this is why, I think, they are happy to see those plants relocated to another country with even cheaper labor costs. All they need (and I say, want) to remain is a little "dab" of productive capacity, upon which they can build their own complexes of financial speculation.

1) I heard Tariq Ali speak to this point in a talk available on the Internet called "On War, Empire, and Resistance."

wingedcentaur

2010-04-16T19:24:00.000-07:00

Good Evening Friends,

It seems I lost some of my post last time. So I'll just have to create it now in this new post. We ended last time with a quote from Kevin Phillips, who quoted Foreign Policy magazine, which talked about state policy that focuses on financial assets is all about wealth creation, with the manufacture of goods and services not considered except as a secondary consideration. We started to refer to chapter four of Phillips's book, Wealth and Democracy (2002), "The World is Our Oyster: The Transformation of Leading Economic Powers."

This chapter talks about financialization, what happens when national economies become dominated by finance and wealth creation based on speculative invesment at the expense of manufacturing: what this means for the gap between rich and poor; what this means for the middle class; what this means for societal health; and so forth. In fact I would say that this is a central theme of Mr. Phillips's writing as a whole. The tendency of capitalism always renounces production - as strange and counterintuitive as that might sound - after an intial period of industrialization (always, always, always remember the New Money/Old Money dynamic here) before the inevitable turn to deindustrialization.

New Money always wants to become Old Money or God-Money, just as quickly as possible. Financialization is a long established method the bourgeoisie uses to try to achieve this. Phillips (in the same chapter referred to previously) says that financialization is nothing new in the history of the world. He implies that the same thing can be seen in the medieval and even ancient periods, no less so in this era of capitalism (the latest expression of elite class solidarity and wealth accumulation.

For example, in 1971 90% of international financial transactions were related to the real economy - trade and long-term investment. 10% were speculative. By 1990 the percentages were reversed. By 1995 about 95% of vastly greater sums were speculative and about 5% were related to the real economy. The trading volume had reached to over a trillion dollars a day, and they tended to be very short term, 80% of them with round trips of a week or less (Chomsky, Noam. Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order. Seven Stories Press. New York, Toronto, London, 1999. pp.23-24)

You see, a little dab'll do ya. The international finance/investment sector do not require (and I argue do not want) a lot of production to get the wealth machine churning. Five percent out of more tha a trillion dollars a day is more than enough for them, thank you very much. They can take real production and build complexes of speculation on top of it, and build additional speculation on top of the first round of speculation, as we have all come to know.

And now some quotes from Kevin Phillips's Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich, 2002.

As societies consolidate, they pass through a profound intellectual change. Energy ceases to vent through the imagination, and takes the form of capital. Brook Adams, The Law of Civilization, 1896 (Phillips, K. p.171). Pretty self-explanatory.

History repeats itself, but only in outline and in the large. We may reasonably expect that in the future, as in the past... that new civilization will begin with pasture and agriculture, and expand into commerce and industry, and luxuriate with finance. Will and Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History, 1968 (Phillips,K. p.171).

I like that phrase, "luxuriate with finance," which, of course, is the goal of the ruling block - to come as close to God-like inevitability with respect to wealth as possible. Although I am not even going to summarize Phillips's argument at all, I will just mention in passing that he provides three historical mini case studies in Chapter Four of his book "The World is Our Oyster." These are Hapsburg Spain of the 1500s and early 1600s, Holland of the 1600s and early to mid 1700s, and Britain of the 1800s and early 1900s.

We'll go to another post and look at two more quotes.

wingedcentaur.

2010-04-13T18:16:00.000-07:00

Good Evening Friends,

I am going to try to persuade you that globalization should be properly thought of: as the process that occurs when the economic elites (with the political elites being pulled along in tow) of leading world economic powers (in this case the United States) restructure the national economy in such a way that gives a severely disproportionate weight to finance above all other sectors of the economy including manufacturing. The economy, in this way, becomes more about financial services, legal services, information services, and the like.

I could be wrong but I believe it was former vice president, Al Gore, who, in the nineties, said that the United States was evolving into or had become a "knowledge-based" society. Remember that, please, for later.

If a country is going to be increasingly more about making money by moving it around, than making things, well, we have to get those things we aren't making anymore from someplace else, other countries.... Globalization.

In his book, Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich (2002), Kevin Phillips quoted a 1996 article in Foreign Policy magazine called "Securities: The New Wealth Machine," explaining that securitization is the issuance of high quality stocks and bonds, generally, which had become the most powerful wealth creation engine in the world. According to the article, while societies used to acquire wealth slowly, they can now do so quickly and directly, but we must keep in mind that "the new approach requires that a state find ways to increase the market value of its productive assets." And, according to Phillips, the article made itself more explicit by saying -again, talking about state policy - that "an economic policy that aims to achieve growth by wealth creation therefore does not attempt to increase the production of goods and services, except as a secondary objective (p.104)."

In other words, when you liberalize finance, you tend to correspondingly restrict trade - and still you have globalization (notice, I say that last part without irony; no quotation marks around the term 'globalization').

Chapter four of Wealth and Democracy, is called "The World is Our Oyster: The Transformation of Leading World Economic Powers." In that chapter Phillips talks about the financialization of the economy and what that has meant in terms of social stability, income inequality between rich and poor, deterioration of public health, squalor, mass pauperization of the working class, and so forth.

I'll continue this next time.

wingedcentaur

2010-04-07T17:28:00.000-07:00

Good Morning Friends,

It has only recently occurred to me that capitalism is merely the latest expression of class solidarity (of the bourgeoisie or ruling block as a whole with each other) and class control of the rest of us. This dynamic, obviously, had expressed itself in other forms throughout history.

Capitalism is only a few centuries old, four hundred years or so, which is a small span of time in the entire recorded history of humankind. Class hierarchy was not brought to us by capitalism. So, all of the "distortions," "problems," "corruption," "government interferences," and so forth, are an expression of a simple truth: class solidarity* trumps capitalism, socialism, communism, or any state-directed economic system that nominally orders a given society.

I think that is what I've saying all along. With this understanding we can turn our attention to the former Soviet Union. I don't need to tell you all that a lot of energy went into asking the question: What went wrong? A lot of energy went into the more fundamental question: Was the Soviet Union a real communist system.

As you know, upholders of capitalism, "left, right, and center," say, yes it was, and the collapse of the Soviet entity is proof that socialism doesn't work. Cut and dried. Sections of the far left, in and out of the former Soviet Union, say that that system was not true communism, or that at some point the dream had been corrupted. Other parts of the radical left, in the last fifteen years, have said, no, in fact, the Soviet Union was a state capitalist system, after all.

"Communism has never been tried." That's a phrase I remember hearing a lot in the 1990s.

Conversely, as you know, when there is a problem in capitalism, the domestic and international political consensus that upholds capitalism, say that there are technical problems in the system that can be worked out with new regulations, or by allowing the system to work the way it is supposed to - "market discipline," I think this is called. Left, right, and center (mainstream analysis) also accuse the system of having morphed into an unholy hybrid of itself and the other.

They throw around populist phrases like "Socialism for the rich," "crony capitalism," and so forth. People are always complaining that certain special interests are not "playing by the rules," and all the rest of it.

I don't think we are served making assumptions that somehow, in some way, the United States is not really capitalist or capitalist enough; nor does it do us any good to say that the former Soviet Union was somehow, in some way, not communist enough. The United States was and always has been a real capitalist (at least in the way that the accumulation of wealth is openly stated as the goal and celebrated by the general society; it is a separate question as to whether we live in a "free market"* society and globalized world) society. The Soviet Union was a real (as it is possible for a state system) communist society.

In the 1990s Russia experienced an economic catastrophe that many people blame on neoliberalism (it certainly didn't help). Boris Yeltsin was president and the country was subjected to a regimen of structural adjustment which called for privatization of state industry and the removal of price controls. The price of food skyrocketed, and the average Russian found themselves having to sell their possessions just to eat.

For a discussion of all of this, see the Adam Curtis documentary film The Trap, part three "We Will Force You To Be Free," starting at about the thirty five minute mark. You should watch the film in its entirety, it's very enlightening and instructive. It is, of course, available for viewing in full on YouTube.

Anyway, all state industry was to be privatized (1), and Russian citizens were given vouchers for shares in the newly created private companies. Remember, they had to sell the lamps, tables, chairs, and what have you, to earn the money to eat; oh yes, did I mention the rampant inflation that eventually rendered the currency near worthless?

And they had to sell the vouchers for shares for food as well. Russian businessmen stepped forward to buy up the vouchers. Through this way and by direct negotiations with Yeltsin's administration, these businessmen bought up perhaps half of Russian state industry, sometimes at less than two percent of its value (but still running into the millions and far beyond what an average Russian could afford, I'm sure).

These businessmen became the so-called "oligarchs." The question is simply this: How is it that these businessmen had the power and wealth to buy up Russian industry, this way, when the chance presented itself. In other words, they had to have been previously empowered, in confirmation of the fact that (state) Communism was but a way of bourgeoisie solidarity and wealth accumulation.

Anyway, Vladimir Putin was elected after Yeltsin. Putin is a former KGB man and as such, a representative of the national security/military/intelligence. Putin jailed or exiled most of the oligarchs. This was seen as a popular move at the time, but I think this action has at least as much to do with the traditional, historical distaste of the elites for the merchant classes.

I'll leave it there. At some point we will need to say a word about what David Harvey calls "uneven geographical development," in relation to state-driven economic systems are different faces of the expression of class control, but not today. Later. Today I want to talk about something else.

wingedcentaur

2010-04-05T04:17:00.000-07:00

Good Morning Friends,

You know, you can simply Google the terms 'grade inflation,' and 'Harvard,' and you will be referred to numerous articles about the matter. Go through some of them and one thing you find is that - among those that accept that grade inflation exists and is a problem - they all identify the starting period of this issue as the 1970s. This is important because the late seventies is commonly identified as the period when neoliberalism (which is simply the resumption of pre-New Deal capitalism, modernized; and neoliberalism has many more techniques of 'virtual' capitalism at its disposal).

Roughly, the New Deal (Roosevelt), Fair Deal (Truman), Great Society (Johnson) period went from the late 1930s to 1974. Remember, even Nixon (1968-1974) signed a whole raft of anti-corporate legislation (such as the Environmental Protection Agency, instituting wage and price controls and so forth; but he did so with a sigh, saying "I guess we're all Keynsians now."

Neoliberalism is about the elite shaping reality by decree. Remember we talked about the documentary movie, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. A central feature of Enron's operations in the 1990s was "mark-to-market" accounting. Bethany Mclean, a writer for Fortune magazine, co-authorof the book, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, showed up on camera to explain the term.

Mark-to-market was an approach brought to the company by Jeff Skilling. Being able to "write his own ticket," it was one of the conditions he set for agreeing to come to work for Ken Lay. Mclean said that Skilling really believed that one should be able to come up with an idea and immediately "book" the future anticipated profits from that idea. Otherwise, some "lesser" man could potentially profit from an idea that a "greater" man had had in the past. Mclean said that Skilling really believed the idea was everything.

That is mark-to-market accounting in a nutshell. Mclean said that Arthur Andersen, Enron's accounting firm, "signed off" on it and the SEC approved it. Yes, young divinity, we confirm your powers.

As you know, neoliberalism is very touchy about intellectual property rights. Its my idea and you can't have it! I thought of it first! See Nobel-prize winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz's discussion of this point (not quite in our language, of course) at Authors@Google: Joseph Stiglitz. You want to go to about the twenty-five minute mark.

The most disturbing manifestation of the God-drive is the desire of neoliberalism to patent genes.

You see, not only do corporations want gods of culture, as we discussed. Not only do they want to be gods of war with the privatized military. They want to be gods of learning with privatized schools and charter schools. They want to be elemental gods. And they want to be thought of as life-bringing gods.

Bechtel tried to compel the nation of Bolivia that they were a water divinity.*

One more piece about Bernie Madoff. There is a documentary piece about his Ponzi scheme scandal. It's a report done by Frontline. You can go to PBS.org to view it. Its called "The Madoff Affair."

Madoff had gone on, doing his thing, for at least forty years. From time to time eyebrows were raised but nothing ever came of it. There was a wonderful recollected moment when the correspondent interviewed a business writer, who had interviewed Madoff . This business writer had recalled Madoff as having been cool, too cool.

There were scattered remarks floating around about his returns being "Too Good to be True," and so forth. But the sheer amount of money he had under management was news in itself. At one point in the interview the business writer said that Madoff said, "Give me some credit for having been in business for forty years..." for having developed solid relationships, having access to proprietary information, having built a reputation for trust and so forth. You should go to the documentary to check it out.

The remark, as the business writer recalls it, is revealing. On one hand its was a plea: Please believe me! On the other hand it was a command: Don't you know who I am, you plebian?! Reality is what I say it is!

We can look at this, in retrospect, as Madoff's desperate attempts to invoke his waning powers. Some of them are luckier, for they become the Old Money.

wingedcentaur

* www.cbc.ca/news/features/water/bolivia.html

2010-04-04T04:07:00.001-07:00

Good Morning Friends,

We have been talking about the discernible link between how the bourgeoisie are educated and how they exercise power in the real world. I have argued that the top one percent, generally, and the top level of that one percent, especially, are basically, in an institutional way, assured that they can reshape reality by declaration. I ended the last post by citing a line from The Godfather II when Michael Corleone, now the head of the "family" has a meeting with the powerful senator of Nevada about some licenses for some casinos. The senator insults Corleone first, in a most unfriendly, almost racist way, before saying yeah, you can have the licenses - for a huge fee payable to me, and so forth.

At one point Corleone said, "We're both part of the same hypocrisy, senator."

Bernie Madoff. I started flipping through a book on Madoff. But for our purposes I am interested in one tiny episode in his life.

You know, a lot investigative work, both journalistic and legal, presumably, is going into trying to figure out: Was Madoff's operation always a fraud or had it previously been legitimate before morphing into a racket; and if so, at what point did the operation become a fraud?

What I want to say is that the question, for our purposes, is rather beside the point; and this has certainly been so since the late seventies. The educational system trains the ruling block to think of reality itself as subject to their decree. One man comes out of the educational system and goes into the world and he is a prominent "law-abiding"* high-ranking government official or revered, un-indicted business tycoon, or an eventual white collar "criminal." It's almost a question of fate as which side of the line they end up on.

"In a sense, the fraud was a vast, unwitting conspiracy among Madoff, his colleagues, family, friends, and investors. The conspiracy perpetuated a fantasy. Madoff promised returns that were too good to be true, and everyone else conspired to believe his unbelievable promises. Madoff was a master illusionist (1)."

Those returns had to be true because Madoff was "gifted." Everybody said so, friends, family, colleagues, and investors. Red flags had been raised over the years, issues and inconsistencies brought to the attention of the government. But the SEC rejected those concerns, for whatever reason, said that Madoff was doing nothing illegal and that, in fact, he was "gifted." The institutional system had granted Madoff, as an individual of the ruling class, the sorcery powers of reshaping reality with a word. When those two FBI agents showed up at his door and asked him if there was an innocent explanation, the state took those powers away, and branded him a criminal.

Anyway, in the 1950s, Far Rockaway Highschool, where Madoff attended, had been considered one of the best schools in New York City (2). There, he was known as a bright guy who didn't work too hard, who was, at that time, "not going to his potential," (3) and so forth. There's a revealing espisode, while meaningless by itself, though some viewed this in connection with other episodes as ominous indicators as to how Madoff might proceed in business; we are interested in what the episode points to institutionally.

For one class in highschool, his class had to give oral book reports. As one classmates recalls the event, Bernie, who obviously had not read a book for the assignment, winged it. When Madoff's turn came he "smoothly" announced the title of the book as 'Hunting and Fishing' by "an author no one had ever heard of, Peter Gunn." Snickers emerged but the class suppressed outright laughter because "no one really wanted to see Bernie fry (4)."

We never learn what grade he got, but the feeling one gets from reading that episode, is that he "got away with it," unlike Bart Simpson.**

It is very well to cite statistics about grade inflation at Harvard and other Ivy League schools (and of course, this happens in other colleges, as the values generated at the top inevitably filter down and infect the rest of us) and highschools, but some concrete examples are called for to drive home the issue.

We'll confine our citations to Harvard. During the period, or overlapping the tenure of Lawrence Summers was president, an economics major had gotten an A on a final identifying "supply" and "demand" as two key elements in the law of supply and demand. A graduate student in classics received an A- for a paper in which he asserted that the Theban plays of Sophocles included Xena, The Warrior Princess (remember that show starring Lucy Lawless that came on after Hercules starring Kevin Sorbo?). And a history "concentrator" got summa cum laude honors for his thesis, Positive Identification of the Body in the Tomb of General Ulysses S. Grant (5).

Ross Douthat is an interesting conservative writer and he had a revealing article in a 2005 issue of The Atlantic called The Truth About Harvard. He is a graduate and he talks about the fact that despite its prestige and the difficulty of gaining admission, once there, one finds a general lack of academic seriousness pervading its halls. I was a bit shocked to read about "shopping week" and so forth. He discusses the different factors involved in grade inflation and content deflation, etc.

But what is of specific interest to us is one of the last papers he wrote while he was at Harvard. The course was "The American West, 1780-1930." The professor handed out two journal articles on the theory and practice of "material history," historical research based on the careful analysis of objects. The students were told to go to the Peabody, Harvard's museum of archeology and ethnology, where the professor had laid out three pairs of objects from the frontier era. One object in the pair was an Indian-made one and the other was made by Europeans. They had to write a ten-page paper comparing the objects and the significance, and so forth. Now, aside from the articles on material history and a general text, North American Indian Jewelry and Adornment, they were to use no sources. He chose a Sioux war club and an American revolver and carrying case (6).

At first he agonized over the assignment, he explains. How in the world was he supposed to crank out ten pages with such thin gruel? But then, sitting at his desk two weeks later, he realized that he had been wrong. The paper turned out to be "pathetically easy" to write." And this was "not despite the dearth of information but because of it. Knowing nothing meant I could write anything. I didn't need to do any reading, absorb any history, or learn anything at all." You should read the article, where Douthat gives an excerpt giving a clear indication of the kind of folderol he was allowed to get away with, and indeed, far more than that. He got an 'A' (7).

I wish a serious survey would be done cataloging all the nonsense test question answers and term paper balderdash, but I think the implication of this mini survey is pretty clear: the ruling class not only survive but thrive, even as they spout reams of literal nonsense and they learn from the institutional structure of the education system tells them that reality is what they say it is. I think one can draw a straight line of connection between what we've reviewed here and this:

On the trillion dollars a day of currency trades on the global markets of the late 1990s (of which only 2 to 3 percent had to do with actual trade in goods or services), done obviously with the aid the Internet. "Partially real and partially unreal, with day-to-day balance simply guesswork, the profits of these digital dances seeped into the real economy, and by the mid-1990s, the financial sector - finance, insurance, real estate - for the first time moved ahead of the manufacturing sector in U.S. national income and GDP measurement (8)." Reality is what we say it is! Now, we're talking about legal activity here.

You know, one has to think that one effect on young people who matriculate through the system of elite education, is to produce cynicism within them. They must come to be convinced that nothing is real, nothing matters, and that there are no lasting values; everything's negotiable and flexible. A certain amount of contempt for the world must be bred as well, even as the next generation of bourgeoisie leadership are given their powers and takes the field.

Bernie Madoff is described as a smooth guy with a crooked grin. We have a lot to learn but it seems clear that a lot of what his operation was about his asserting and getting all kinds of other people to believe that reality was what he said it was, and for a long time the state approved of his powers. We might ask the question: Why didn't he invest the money?

But why didn't Madoff read a book for that book report? Remember (and you should read his article) Ross Douthat did his Harvard assignment precisely to the specifications laid out by the instructor; but these guidelines provided so little foundation, that he, and no doubt everyone else in the class, found themselves largely having to bluff their way through the assignment.

Again, why didn't Bernie Madoff read a book for that book report?
Answer: Why should he? There was no need. They say hard work never killed anybody, but why take the chance?

I'll just leave you with this. After all the trouble we've had with derivatives, after all the trouble we're having sorting out the "toxic," derivative-based assets, after all the risk they had accumulated (not spread as the propaganda went) and after all the damage they've inflicted and may continue to inflict, as they explode like land mine traps; state governments are using derivatives to try to get their books in shape (9).

In addition to that, there is at least a twenty year history of "the warping, since the 1990s, by some arguments, intentional, of the collection and presentation of U.S. economic data to make it more market-supportive (10)."

We're both part of the same hypocrisy, senator.

wingedcentaur

1) Arvedlund, Erin. Too Good to Be True: The Rise and Fall of Bernie Madoff. Portfolio. Penguin Group, 2009. p.8

* This is not a new thought, but Bernie Madoff was a criminal because of the system empowered him in a certain way. He didn't invest the money in the stock market like he was supposed to; and yet even following the rules there is something predatory about the stock market itself - I'll talk about that in the next post, in which we'll invoke the case of Martha Stewart.

2) ibid, p16

3) Arvedlund, Erin. p17

4) ibid, p.18

** I'm talking about an episode of The Simpsons. You know, the cartoon? Bart Simpson tried to fudge his way through a book report. He wasn't nearly as "smooth" as Bernie Madoff, and so Simpson failed.

5) see article harvardmagazine.com/2002/03/grade-inflation-resolved.html The article is written by humorist, Andy Borowitz, and he was being ironic, of course, but I don't think the examples he gave were fabricated.

6) see Ross Douthat's article www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2005/03/the-truth-about-harvard/3726

7) ibid

8) Phillips, Kevin. Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich. Broadway Books. New York, 2002. p.138

9) This was reported by NPR (WNYC) the other day. Just Google the words state, governments, derivatives, and you will be sent to many relevant articles. But I heard this on the radio.

10) Phillips, Kevin. Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and The Global Crisis of American Capitalism. Viking, 2008. pp.79-80.

2010-04-02T20:15:00.001-07:00

Good Evening Friends,

I've been saying that a good way of contextualizing and understanding the behavior of the ruling block is to take an anthropological interest in how they are trained to relate to the world within the incubator of their education system.* I think the deferential treatment they demand and receive from the educational system is part of the broader institutional system, which is, for them, a marvelous, magical space in which reality is what they say it is.** As I mentioned, for me, this dynamic we've been discussing put other things into perspective.

The financial and economic crisis and The Obama Administration. As the president was putting his government together, and we got a look at the figures he was bringing into substantial authority, people who, according to a lot of people, failed miserably in other circumstances in terms of financial and economic policy planning; or indeed, came up with or loudly cheerleaded the bad ideas that seemed to bring this crisis about, the question came up: why are these people back in positions of authority, and in the case of one or two of them, not in jail? How is it that the CEOs and other top executives reap huge bonuses and pay packages, even as their companies are imploding around them?***

Friends, do you remember the scene in The Godfather II film, when Michael Corleone, the Don now (I can't call him Godfather... There was only one Godfather and that was Vito Corleone), moved the "family" operations out west to Nevada, and he had a meeting with a powerful senator about some casinos? The senator spoke to Michael in the most unfriendly, almost racist terms, in a way that clearly indicated that he thought he was better than Michael and his "family."

The senator told him that the Corleones and all their like disgusted him, as well as the terms for getting those licenses, what his cut was to be. Finding the proposed terms not to his liking, the Don made a counterproposal: nothing. Anyway, the senator leaves in a huff (he tries to affect easy amusement, as if listening to the rantings of a child, but he left in a huff). The senator's final insult is this: The Corleones are not to contact him, the senator directly ever again. "From now on you deal with Turnbull," said the lawmaker.

But at one point of their conversation, Michael had said, "We're both part of the same hypocrisy, senator." When I firts heard that line, years ago, I didn't think anything of it. I took it in very, very general terms: the whole world is a cold, cruel place in many ways. Like that.

I never imagined how literally true it could be. This brings me to Bernie Madoff and I'll continue with this tomorrow.

* The bourgeoisie, the top one percent in economic terms, in a sense, have a separate educational system from the rest of us. It is to train them to be the future intellectual and political leaders of society, and the rest of us to be their servants (I'm exaggerating but not by much). Students who matriculate through this elite apparatus, at times, say this openly: see essay by Brian Jones

socialistworker.org/2009/07/29/who-does-obama-answer-to

Even when they go to school with the rest of us plebians, they are somewhat isolated from the rest of us, through the mechanism of "Gifted and Talented" programs.

** You can just Google terms like 'grade inflation,' 'content deflation,' 'Harvard,' and so forth and you can read articles about the persistent problem of grade inflation at Ivy League schools and other colleges, as well as high schools (especially those considered 'feeders' for the Ivies, and so forth. Recall the young man from Canada, I told you about who started college at sixteen. He began failing his classes in high school and teachers and administrators decided he needed to be promoted, instead of held back or given extra help. Failure is not failure for the ruling block, and as I mentioned, this dynamic runs right through kindergarten through graduate school through politics and government and business. Why is it that discredited figures from the past keep showing up in positions of authority to help solve this financial and economic crisis? Why do CEOs and other top executives who have demonstrably destroyed their firms, nevertheless, collect astronomical bonuses and compensations packages.

*** My theory is, taking something from the article by Jennifer Senior : The Myth of the Gifted Child: the junior meritocracy, I have speculated that he (my classmate from Canada) must have taken one of those I.Q. tests of four years of age or so, and throughout his academic career, the book on him must have been that he was gifted, so if he failed his classes, there wasn't something wrong with his understanding or study habits, it must be the teacher's fault of something. It seems that students in college feel much more free, these days, to second guess the professors about their grades. If a CEO caused his investment bank to take way too much risk with predictable, results, an utter implosion, why, it can't be his fault, he's "gifted." If a member of the Obama administration, responsible for helping to shape the response to this current recession, advocated for exactly the wrong policies that brought us to this sorry state today, it can't be his fault, for he's "gifted." The fault must lie elsewhere.

wingedcentaur

2010-04-01T14:58:00.000-07:00

Friends,

Oh yeah! There was one more quote I wanted to offer from the Jennifer Senior article.

"The irony is that doing well on these exams [to determine the eligiblity of students for Gifted and Talented programs] can be just as damaging as doing poorly on them. "Gifted" is an awfully uncomfortable label for some children to wear. It can cripple their thinking, make them terrified of risk (p.82)."

And according to one administrator, '"It's not entirely inaccurate to observe that more and more high-achieving students go off to university and don't care about anything. They don't ask questions, they don't have original ideas. And its not because there's anything wrong with them, but because they were conditioned to believe that learning is about giving back the right answer.... These tests, at 4, start that long process of conditioning. Right then, children start to believe that learning means pleasing the powerful adult in whose presence you are (p.82)."'

It is these youngsters, crippled in their thinking and "terrified of risk," who are supposed to be the ones who grow up and take the helms of the commanding heights of the economy, becoming America's "free market" crusaders. We'll talk more about this when we briefly discuss Noam Chomsky's theory of "really existing markets."

wingedcentaur

2010-04-01T05:46:00.001-07:00

Good Morning Friends,

Today I would like to briefly talk about an article that appeared in the Feburary 8, 2010 issue of New York magazine. The article is either called The Myth of the Gifted Child, as it appears on the cover; or it is called The Junior Meritocracy, as it appears on the inside. I hate when they do that! In any event, the article was written by Jennifer Senior.

The blurb on the front cover reads: "If a four-year-old aces an intelligence test, she is often set for life. Trouble is that test is worthless." That is the point of the article, and let me say, that this article possesses personal meaning for me, but not in the way you might think.

It seems that almost every prestigious private school and selective public school in New York City requires standardized exams of some kind for admission into kindergarten. Yes, friends, kindergarten! Indeed, some schools giving such tests "... so much weight that they won't even consider applicants who score below the top 3 percent." and "... if a child manages to vault over it," [this threshold] "and in turn gets into one of these selective schools, it can set him or her on a successful glide path for life (p.28)."

Applicants might have to take the WPPSI-III. I don't remember what that acronym stands for but it is administered by the Educational Records Bureau, and for that reason it is known by many parents as the ERB test. Some schools may require the OLSAT test: Otis Lennon School Ability Test. Some may require the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales, which cost $275 to take. And it seems that there is an overlapping testing regime to see which student qualify for Gifted and Talented programs in schools.

I went to a solid public elementary school where there was a G&T program. I was not in it but I remember there where kids who were. An announcement would come over the public address and some kids would get up and go off somewhere, if memory serves - right in the middle of some class with the rest of us ordinary students. I remember wondering, at times like this, where they were going and what they were doing and what was happening to them.

Anyway, parents might drill their four-year-olds to an hour or more at a time, getting them ready for the big test with practice exams, with the help of a $350 "evaluator," perhaps a psychology graduate student. Some of the tests are given by licensed teachers and focus on "school readiness." Some of the tests are given and evaluated by psychologists and focus on abstract thinking and conceptualization.

But, then again, all the tests are pretty much the same. No matter which test a child takes, odds are they will all be asked to "do something with triangles," as one professional put it.

Of course, failure to meet these thresholds "hardly spells doom," as the article put, because the very fact that certain youngsters find themselves in such contention shows that their families occupy an elevated class position to begin with. But to those lucky four-year-olds who make the cut, the added advantages "reverberate into the world beyond," since "acing" such exams often lead them into gaining admission into elite high schools such as Hunter College High, Trinity, Dalton, and others.

And from there, about a third or more of them go on to the Ivy League colleges, with all the promise that having those institutions on their resumes. These tests make allegedly quantitative, static, unchangeable determinations about a child's intelligence quotient. The article says that 110-120 is considered smart; 120 to 130 very smart; and a score of 140 or more, and people start using the term 'genius' and so forth.

The article never answers its implicit question: why is such a system in place. A question worth asking, especially since "Even administrators who use the exams - indeed, especially the administrators who use these exams - say they're practically worthless as predictors of future intelligence (p.30)." I.Q. is naturally fluid, in other words, and it can deteriorate if one does not keep his or her mind engaged.

In fact, David Lohman, a psychologist at the University of Iowa, who, in 2006 co-authored a paper called 'Gifted Today But Not Tomorrow?,' was asked: how many four year olds who scored a 130 or above would do so again as seventeen year olds? His answer was about 25 percent (p.31).

The article almost answers its own question when Jennifer Senior wrote: "Rather than promoting a meritocracy, in other words, these tests instead retard one. They reflect the world as it's already stratified - and then perpetuate the same stratification." You see, Senior goes right up to the edge but then turns away.

You know, I went to Rutgers University in Newark for a time. One year I stayed in a dorm with a young man from Canada. He had started college at sixteen. He was eighteen when I met him, and on track to graduate at twenty years of age. He was asked how he came to enter college at such a relatively young age.

He explained that there had come a point in his education when his performance deteriorated. In fact the words he used was that he was "failing" his classes. The assumption that he might have needed extra help or that he should have been switched to a remedial program was, apparently, never entertained. It was never assumed that he needed to "buckle down," and so forth, to master the material. Instead the assumption was made that he wasn't being challenged enough by his classes, that he was bored, unstimulated. The solution, to his teachers and parents, was obvious: he needed to be promoted.

You should keep this in mind in relation to how this government is handling the financial crisis, with respect to the figures who keep resurfacing in positions of authority in the Obama administration (figures whom a lot of people have said have demonstrably failed in previous positions of policy planning and who actually promoted policies that helped cause the crisis and so forth). How do they keep managing to turn failure into success? How do they manage such a trick?

I think what the experience of my friend shows, in connection with the insight into how the bourgeoisie educate their children provided by this article, is that the ruling one percent live in a marvelously sealed magical reality, in which failure equals success. Not only does failure equal success. Failure is not really failure in their world. Failure is not an indication that one is beyond his or her depth, but rather an indication that you are not being sufficiently challenged. You need a much greater challenge and more responsibility and authority, and you will surely rise to the occasion and realize your potential.

So, my friend had obviously had an established reputation for being "gifted" from an early age. It seems likely that he had taken some intelligence test at four years old or so, and that "objective" data was never questioned or revised in any way. High schools and colleges collude to maintain the illusion. I would refer you to an article in USAToday.com about Ivy League grade inflation.

www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/2002/02/08/edtwof2.htw

It's dated 02/07/2002. You may recall there was a grade inflation "scandal" at Harvard several years back. An analysis had found that eight out of ten Harvard students graduated with honors, and nearly half received A's in their courses.

A few more statistics from this article.

1966: 22 percent of Harvard undergrads earned As in their courses
1996: the number rose to 46 percent
1996: 82 percent of seniors graduated with honors

1973: 31 percent of Princeton undergrads earned As
1997: the number rose to 43 percent
1997: only 12 percent of all grades were below the B range

The article says that there are well documented cases of high schools doing this too.

The article raises and dismisses all kinds of reasons offered by professors - some with greater validity than others, while pointing out the most obvious one: "Families paying more than $30,000 a year for college education expect something more for their money than a report card full of gentleman's C's." By the way, "gentleman's C's" are inflated grades as well, are they not?

Okay. But read the article. It's very short and to the point. Now, with this crisis we're living through and with state governments slashing budgets, left and right, we can expect tuition and other fees to go up at colleges and universities, I would expect that we will see increasing pressure on grade inflation, as well as increasing pressure on content deflation, in terms of difficulty of the material offered in college courses.

Here's how I interpret the data given in that article. It is the unconsciously directed, institutional expression of the following anxiety: These kids can't be ordinary! They just can't be mere mortals! They are the future "leaders of the free world" in politics, "masters of the universe" in business and finance, and conquering warlords (no doubt as commissioned officers occupying strategic and tactical planning positions, far removed from the drudgery of actual combat) in the military. They can't be like the unwashed masses!

And I think this dynamic goes a long way to explain why it is that corporate CEOs and other top executives get astronomical bonuses and pay packages, that appear to be entirely unconnected with performance. The institutional dynamic is in place by the time they start kindergarten. Failure does not mean failure in the world of the ruling block.

Now, given what we know about grade inflation in high school (the aforementioned article refers to "well documented cases of grade inflation in high school; and while it did not say so, no doubt these cases mostly occur in the elite high schools, that serve as feeders for the Ivies) and college, we must consider what this means in light of the latest alarm bell to ring out of Washington that our education system is broken.

As you know, the Obama administration is putting pressure on state governments to, among other things, lift their caps on the number of charter schools they will allow, in order to get federal money. Let me just put the matter this way: Will the transfer of money from the public sector to the private sector lead to the dumbing down of America?

2010-03-31T19:52:00.000-07:00

Good Evening Friends,

The various virtual and disaster mechanisms of capitalism,* we've been discussing, taken together, are known by different names by different people to describe the same, essentially vampiric or parasitical process. Noam Chomsky calls these things the theory of "really existing markets." Michael Parenti calls this the "third worldization of everywhere." Michel Chussudovsky calls this "The Globalization of Poverty." David Harvey calls this "accumulation by dispossession."

I would argue that this is the true meaning of reincarnation, along with Buddhism. We would call this process something like "immortality-seeking through the misappropriation of life-force."

It is right that we equate money with life-force. Our use of money comes to us through our worship of the gods. I would reccommend a great book to you about this by a man called Tad Crawford. The Secret Life of Money: Teaching Tales of Spending, Receiving, Saving, and Owing. published by G.P. Putnam's Sons. New York, 1994. He used myths, tales, and fables to help us - as it says in the inside jacket cover of the book - "free ourselves from this cultural obsession... by learning where money's deeper value lies in the world and in our psyches."

I mention this because I want to suggest that there is also a generational dynamic to virtual and disaster**** mechanisms. By that I mean that present generations feel the need to "fill the shoes" of the previous generation. Crawford gives an analysis of the film For Richer, For Poorer. Basically the father worked hard and made a fortune, which supported his wife and son in lavish style (pp. 123-126). The father uses different ways to try to get his son to become a success in his own right and not to be so dependent on him.

As Crawford points out: "The next generation inherits the money, but often lacks the ambition. It is difficult to find a reason to strive in the world. The wealth will take care of material needs, and the achievements of the parent can seldom be matched (p.124)."

I want to suggest that the various mechanisms of virtual capitalism** and corporate sponsorship of cultural events, which is motivated by the same impulse that drove the pharaohs to have the pyramids built, are motivated by this generational dynamic, an attempt of present and upcoming generations to "fill the shoes" of previous generations held up a paragons of productivity and significance in the world.

For example, we know that in his early business career, George W. Bush, was not as successful in the oil industry as his father, George H.W. Bush, therefore we could argue that 'virtual' responses were necessary - from both father and son - to try to "fill the gap" between the achievements of Bush 41 and Bush 43 in this area.***

Let's revisit corporate sponsorship of cultural activities. Let's go back to the "Pepsi-sponsored papal visits," "Molson concerts," "Izod zoos," and "Nike afterschool basketball programs." And let us not forget the Altoids "Curiously Strong Collection" art exhibition.

Let us ask ourselves: what do these companies have in common? They make products - while the top levels of these organization have been made rich from them - that are not exactly central to world progress, to say the least. The question, 'Is this all there is?' arises. Say you're one of these executives or CEOs and you go home to visit your family. And your mother says something like: 'You know, your cousin Bernard is a brain surgeon in Greenwich.' And there you are, in the business of trying to sell more beer, more candy, more sneakers, more soda than anybody else. You just have to get into other areas of endeavor. You just have to!

* Remember, what we have called 'virtual' and what Naomi Klein calls 'disaster' capitalism are two modalities that are triggered when so-called 'natural' capitalism runs up against its various structural barriers to constant expansion. When this happens, the frustration of the bourgeoisie, who do not want to be capitalists to start with (but who will grudgingly go along with it as long as expansion is continual), increases exponentially; and they degenerate into an Alice in Wonderland fantasy of imaginary, casino-like, higly speculative finance-driven economics, with its frantic merger-mania, or a kind of "Hulk Smash!" furious imperial aggression, to keep the growth going.

** We also looked at analysis from Barbara Ehrenreich's book, Bright-Sided, the third chapter, which gave some indication that capitalism might have roots in Calvinism. She made the suggestion even stronger in the introduction of her book when she invoked the sociologist Max Weber's book Protestantism and the Spirit of Capitalism. And I think this gives added credence to my feeling that capitalism, itself, was a reluctantly created system. Anyway, I said that another way to view the financialization of the economy was/is a way the bourgeoisie manages to work without working, and to say to "God," 'Look, see how much profit I have created. I have been productive. Bless me.'

*** footnote pending. I just have to get some information from a Molly Ivins book on George W. Bush. But what we can say now, is that with decreasing oil supply, it would have been structurally impossible for the younger Bush to duplicate his father's success, in concrete terms - at least on the domestic side - of decades earlier.

**** Here, we mean war as the ultimate disaster capitalism. You will recall that there where a lot of people who said that the U.S. invasion of Iraq in the spring of 2003 was George W. Bush taking care of unfinished business of his father's. As Kevin Phillips wrote: "Controversial wars and geopolitical ambitions, after all, have frequently originated as dynastic ambitions," (Kevin Phillips. American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, And The Politics of Deceit In The House of Bush. Viking Penguin, 2004. p.1 introduction).

wingedcentaur

2010-03-28T04:12:00.000-07:00

Good Morning Friends,

At what price, Immortality? That is what we've been discussing.

You know, late in the nineteenth century, with industrialization of the United States corporations went from temporary, project-based entities to permanent concentrations of oligarchical power, or "private tyrannies," and so forth. Corporations became personalized, they became almost like people, as the expression goes. Perhaps both more than people because they are "immortal" and have limited liability. But this development was viewed with dismay by conservative legal scholars, who viewed the very existence of corporations, themselves, as an attack on market principles (1).

Let me just say, here, that corporations are, by definition, vampiric entities. We'll come back to that later.

Remember, "immortality" is not possible without robbing life-force from others. Mario Puzo opened his novel, The Godfather, with a quote from Balzac: "Behind every great fortune lies a crime." Indeed, Don Vito Corleone told his son, Santino: "A lawyer can steal more money with a briefcase than a thousand men with guns and masks." In Puzo's novel, The Last Don, Don Clericuzio told his oldest son, Giorgio, that he would be attending the Wharton School of Business, where he with the expressed purpose of learning how to steal money while staying within the law.

It was reported, in the late nineties, that over half the U.S. trade with Mexico, had been intrafirm, trade happening by companies - the movement of goods across borders, with themselves! This was up fifteen percent since the passage of NAFTA. In 1989 U.S.-owned plants in northern Mexico, employing few workers and with virtually no linkages to the Mexican economy (in other words, taking resources and subsidies but giving nothing to the host country), produced more than 33 percent of engine blocks used in U.S. cars and 75 percent of other essential components (2).

The post-NAFTA collapse of the Mexican economy in 1994 led to the increase of U.S.- Mexico "trade" and the subordination of Mexico into a service role for the U.S. economy, as a provider of very cheap manufactured goods, with industrial wages at one-tenth those in the U.S. (3). As a result, poverty increased almost as fast as the number of billionaires increased, and in 1999 up to half the population could not get enough food to eat; and yet the man who controlled the corn market remained on the list of Mexico's billionaires (4).

In the early WW II period, George Kennan, one of the most influential stategic planners, assigned each sector of the world its function. Africa was to be exploited by Europe for its reconstruction. A year earlier, a high-level planning study had urged '"that cooperative development of the cheap foodstuffs and raw materials of northern Africa could help forge Europen unity and create an economic base for continental recovery (5)."' Europe was to be reinvigorated by draining more life-force from Africa. Vampires are powerful, mysterious beings, and long-lived, potentially immortal. But they cannot survive in that form without drinking the blood of lowly mortals.

From 1945 on, the United States used Brazil as a '"testing area for modern scientific methods of industrial development based solidly on capitalism."' The experiment, as it was conceived, was carried out with the '"best of intentions."' Foreign investors benefitted but planners '"sincerely believed"' that the people of Brazil would benefit as well. According to the business press, Brazil became '"the Latin American darling of the international business community" under military rule, while the World Bank reported that two-thirds of the population did not have enough food for normal physical activity. 1989 was a golden year for the business world, with profits having tripled over 1988, while industrial wages in Brazil, already among the lowest in the world, had declined another twenty percent (6).

Corporations are, by their nature, structurally vampiric on public resources. As you know, it was not the New Deal but World War Two, which pulled America out of the Great Depression.

The big worry of the business community was what were they going to do after the war. It was agreed generally, that without state intervention, the economy would head right back into depression. Industry, especially, aircraft could not exist in a pure, competitive, unsubsidized, actually free enterprise environment. Harry Truman's Air Force secretary said that the word to use was not 'subsidy' but 'security' (7). The Pentagon was thought to be a good way to socialize risk and transfer cost to the public. The same holds true for just about every dynamic sector of the economy: computers and electronics, automation, biotechnology, and communications (8).

One last illustration of "really existing free market theory." Two economists, Rob van Tulder and Winfried Ruigrock did a technical study which found that '"virtually all of the world's largest core firms have experienced a decisive influence from government policies and/or trade barriers on their strategy and competitive position"' and '"at least twenty companies in the 1993 Fortune 100 would not have survived at all as independent companies, if they had not been saved by their respective governments,"' through bailouts and state takeover (9). These were "zombie" organizations. Zombies are undead creatures as well, that persist unnaturally by eating Brains! Brains! Brains!, don't they?

One such organization was Lockheed, which was saved from collapse by massive goverment by massive loan guarantees. The same study pointed out that government intervention, which has "been the rule rather than the exception over the past two centuries... has played a key role in the development and diffusion of many products and process innovations - particularly in aerospace, electronics, modern agriculture, materials technologies, energy, and transportation technology,"' as well as telecommunications and information technologies generally, and in earlier periods, textiles, steel, and energy. Government policies '"have been an overwhelming force in shaping the strategies and competitiveness of the world's largest firms."' Other technical studies reached the same conclusions (10).

All references came from Profits Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order. Noam Chomsky. Seven Stories Press. New York, Toronto, London, 1999.

1) p.97

2) p.110

3) p.110

4) pp. 27-28

5) p.113

6) p.27

7) pp.36-37

8) p.37

9) p.38

10) p.38

I'll continue a little later on.

wingedcentaur

2010-03-27T19:34:00.000-07:00

Good Evening Friends,

As you know, for every idea we develop in this blog, our starting point is always the same: Man is the desire to become God (because we "exist without justification," which we seek by trying to "become" God in various ways, and depending upon our success, we feel ourselves in tune with some kind of universal law, which seems to come from outside ourselves).

We have been talking about the amassing of wealth and its ostentatious display, specifically in the form of corporate sponsorship projects of cultural events, not unlike what the Egyptian pharaohs had been up to, as well as the other ancient Near Eastern "divine" rulers, as a kind of immortality-seeking.

We looked at a case study of the company called Altoids (the makers of the curiously strong breath mint candy) as an example; and we conjectured that, though they are a billion dollar concern, no doubt, that there was, nevertheless, a felt feeling of frivolousness within the decision-making hierarchy as a whole about their place in the world, given the nature of their product (which is another mark against capitalism, as it marginalizes, alienates, and even trivializes people, even inflicting harmful spiritual and psychological effects upon sections of the economic ruling block, who appear to benefit the most from the system.

We theorized that this alienation created a desperation within them to "make my mark on the world," and so forth. You'll recall that Altoids purchased the works of art of twenty up and coming artists for two-hundred-fifty thousand dollars, and promoted the art showing as the Curiously Strong Collection. And so on and so forth.

But, again, what is the ultimate goal of corporate sponsorship: the "Molson concerts, Pepsi-sponsored papal visits, Izod zoos, and Nike after-school basketball programs?"
Answer: to create the collective mindset that believes that "everything from small community events to large religious gatherings are believed to '"need a sponsor,"' to get off the ground[.]" And as Leslie Savan, author of The Sponsored Life said: "we become collectively convinced not that coporations are hitching a ride on our cultural and communal activities, but that creativity and congregation would be impossible without their generosity" (Klein, Naomi. NoLogo. Tenth Anniversary edition, p.35).

Some of them want to become gods of culture.

We said before that the pursuit of immortality involves the taking of life-force from others. Immortality is not a cost-free, gift. This is what a vampire is about. This is what a zombie is about. This process is worse than destructive, in that people are prevented from finding their own souls to begin with. This, we identified as the case in the play, Death of a Salesman (psychological reincarnation); and this is true in other less severe ways in which parents to "live through" their children.

What are the advertising-free childhood movements all about? They are about the recognition that incessant corporate advertising, aimed at children, not only indoctrinates them with consumption-based values, but also plays an impedimentary role in preventing children from finding their own souls. Children are seen to be victimized by the relentless marketing and advertising.

The privatization of public forums like papal visits and zoos, creates, I think, an un-democratizing effect on communities, de-politicizes and de-intellectualizes them, makes them passive spectators not participants in the public square, and prevents them from finding their own souls. To return to advertising to children, the transaction that happens between the child, the television, and the corporation, is the direct robbing of life-force of the child to enhance the life-force of the corporation, their profits. Some people see it as something like a vampiric process because a child's internal landscape has not reached maturity.

That there can be no immortality without robbing life-force from others, is true of the family dynamic (Death of a Salesman); is a crucial recognition which, in part, accounts for the difference between Buddhism and Hinduism); is true for corporate advertising, branding, and its ultimate end point, corporate sponsorship; and it is true for the day-to-day reality of the broader, global political economy.

I'll go on with this tomorrow.

wingedcentaur

2010-03-24T19:40:00.000-07:00

Good Evening Friends,

NoLogo. Tenth Anniversary Edition. Naomi Klein. Picador. New York, 2000, 2002, 2009. pp. 31 & 34-35.

"Cultural products are the all-time favorite plaything of the powerful, tossed from wealthy statesmen such as Gaius Cilnius Maecenas, who set up the poet Horace in a writing estate in 33 B.C., and from rulers like Francis I and the Medici family, whose love of the arts bolstered the status of Renaissance painters in the sixtenth century. Though the degree of meddling varies, our culture was built on compromises between nations of public good and the personal, political, and financial ambitions of the rich and powerful.

"When sponsorship took off as a stand-in for public funds in the mid-eighties, many corporations that had been experimenting with the practice ceased to see sponsorship as a hybrid of philanthropy and image promotion and began to treat it more purely as a marketing tool, and a highly effective one at that. As its promotional value grew - and as dependency on sponsorship revenue increased in the cultural industries - the delicate dynamic between sponsors and the sponsored began to shift, with many corporations becoming more ambitious in their demands for grander acknowledgements and control, even buying events outright. Molson and Miller beer, ..., are no longer satisfied with having their logos on banners at rock concerts. Instead, they have pioneered a new kind of sponsored concert in which the blue-chip stars who perform are entirely upstaged by their hosting brand. And while corporate sponsorship has long been a mainstay in museums and galleries, when Phillip Morris - owned Altoids mints decided in January 1999 that it wanted to get into the game, it cut out the middleman. Rather than sponsoring an existing show, the company spent $250,000 to buy works by twenty emerging artiststs and launch its own Curiously Strong Collection, a traveling art exhibition that plays on the Altoids marketing slogan, "curiously strong mints." Chris Pedd, Altoids brand manager, said, "We decided to take it to the next level."

"These companies are part of a larger phenomenon explained by Lesa Ukman, executive editor of the International Events Group Sponsorship Project, the industry's bible: "From MasterCard and Dannon to Phoenix Home Life and LaSalle Bank, companies are buying properties and creating their own events. This is not because they want to get into the business. It's because proposals sponsors receive don't fit their requirements or because they've had negative experiences buying into someone else's gig." There is a certain logic to this progression: first, a select group of manufacturers transcend their connection to earthbound products, then, with marketing elevated as the pinnacle of their businesses, they attempt to alter marketing's social status as a commercial interruption and replace it with seamless integration.

"The most insidious effect of this shift is that after a few years of Molson concerts, Pepsi-sponsored papal visits, Izod zoos and Nike after-school basketball programs, everything from small community events to large religious gatherings are believed to "need a sponsor," to get off the ground; August 1999, for instance, saw the first-ever private wedding with corporate sponsorship. This is what Leslie Savan, author of The Sponsored Life, describes as symptom number one of the sponsored mindset: we become collectively convinced not that corporations are hitching a ride on our cultural and communal activities, but that creativity and congregation would be impossible without their generosity."

And some of them want to be gods of culture. In the case of Molson and Miller, both purveyors of intoxicating beverages, and their sponsorship of music concerts, one thinks of the goat-footed god, Pan. I will deconstruct the above passage tomorrow.

It is this above passage that I would identify as the core thesis of Naomi Klein's book. To make the population "collectively convinced" that "creativity and congregation would be impossible without their generosity," is the underlying reason why the corporate sector of the "ruling block," (as I have also heard the bourgeoisie referred to) engages in branding, in the first place (remember, we talked a little bit about branding previously), and then decides to "take it to the next level," by sponsoring various cultural events.

This is the God-drive that is afraid of death, that seeks immortality, that wants to be remembered by as many generations as possible, after one is dead. We all have this drive, but unlike corporations, the only means of "living on" in some way, available to ninety-nine percent of the world's population is to reproduce ourselves biologically, by having children.

Even in individual cases like this, the God-drive can be corrupted. We talked about this before. In his book, Family Secrets (which I actually listened to on audio tape), family therapist, John Bradshaw referred to Carl Jung, who said something to the effect that the greatest danger to children is the unlived life of the parents.

Suppose, said Bradshaw, you have a man who spends hours playing baseball in the backyard with his young son. He hits fly balls to the boy, so that he can practice "his" fielding skills. What a great dad, right? How can you not admire a man who spends so much time with his boy.

Bradshaw refers to a poem written by a fellow called Craig Sanchez, about the emotional abuse that can come to a boy playing baseball with his dad - under the wrong circumstances. Bradshaw recited a couple lines of the poem, which is seen from the boy's point of view. The boy's angst and desperation is communicated. The feeling of the boy is that he just has to catch it. "I'm so lucky to have a dad like this. The other boys don't have a dad like this," and so forth. But the boy is near-sighted, he can barely see the fly balls, much less catch them. He really would rather be doing something else with his dad, like catching butterflies or something.

This father was a lover of baseball. He had had dreams of being a major leaguer but he wasn't quite good enough to go beyond college ball, or he suffered a preemptive injury, something like that, and his ambitions in that direction was disappointed. But he couldn't let it go. He was determined to have his dream realized through his son. This is classic, of course.

You know we talked about this in connection with the Arthur Miller play, Death of a Salesman. I said that the play was an extreme example of the secular equivalent of reincarnation. After Willie Loman is buried and the family, including friend 'Uncle' Charlie convene at the Loman home, there is a point in which Hap says that Willie, his and Biff's father, "had a good dream," and that he was going to stay in New York (he rejected his brother Biff's offer to go out west with him to perhaps start a ranch), and "win it for him."

I said that Hap might as well have said, "I am Willie Loman now." Willie Loman had reincarnated in the body of his neglected second child, Hap. The exact personality dimensions of the father had been duplicated in the son - to a degree very far beyond the normal ways in which parents influence their children.

Willie has destroyed his son. Actually, to say that the salesman 'destroyed' is too kind, because to say that one is destroyed is to presupposes that he existed in a meaningfully independent way to begin with. Hap did not. He never developed his own personality. He never found his own soul.

Buddhism, having come out of Hinduism, accepted the belief in reincarnation. But the founder of Buddhism thought that the cycle of life-death-rebirth should and must be broken. I'm just speculating here, but there seems to have been the recognition that "immortality" cannot come except by taking the life-force of others.

What is the vampire lore all about? One doesn't just get to live "forever" for no price. Vampires must kill to live, must drink other people's blood. But at least, in these cases, people had previously lived. The process that occasionally happens in families, with the example about the baseball dad, I gave, for instance, and certainly the tragic tale of the Loman family, is even more insidious. The person, in a real sense, is prevented from 'living' in the first place.

Let's return to the passage I quoted from Naomi Klein's NoLogo. Sponsorship of cultural events, in addition to being an expression of the God-drive that seeks "immortality," much like the pyramids did for the pharaohs and so forth, this is also one of the classic ways in which New Money seeks to become Old Money. This is the way in which the ruling block has traditionally sought to become "part of something larger than myself," and so forth. You know, this is the strategy that The Godfather Vito Corleone pursued to come in from the cold, or as Don Clericuzio said, for he and his "family" to "disappear into the lawful world and enjoy our wealth without fear."

But this fear has many dimensions, as we have seen. The ruling block are not just motivated by fear of the "law."

Let's go back to the case of Altoids breath mints. Altoids are candy, right? I doubt they would put it that way, for obvious reasons.

Friends, there is something almost noble about being a candy maker, making fudge and all kind of delicious treats that give children, and let's admit it, the rest of us joy. To drive an ice cream truck in the summer is a beneficent service; like having a small shop where you delight your patronage with homemade taffy, fudge, pumpkin, banana, and sweet potato ice cream. There is joy and meaning to be found in sharing such simple pleasures with others. Indeed, this is certainly why the multinational concerns buy small businesses with comfortable, reassurring brand identities - which they desire to assimilate onto themselves.

This ideological concern must have been what drove Phillip Morris to buy Kraft in 1988 for 12.6 billion dollars, six times what it was supposed to be worth on paper (Klein, Tenth Anniversay Edition, NoLogo). After all, Kraft is a name that makes one feel all warm inside, right?

But let's return to the Altoids case. For some people, merely assimilating warmer and fuzzier brands in related areas is not nearly enough, and is even beside the point.

The people at the Altoids corporation, who make the seven, eight, nine figure salaries: go to work everyday in their handmade, tailored suits; drive the slickest, most fashionable, most expensive European cars, send their children to the "best" schools, and so forth. No one can reproach them. Their material success is proof to all that they are "doing something right," and indeed, even that their parents "must've done something right," in accordance with some law of the universe and so forth.

But we can imagine, in individuals working at Altoids, a little voice inside them saying things like: You make Candy! That's what you do, you make candy. Is this what you went $175,000 in the hole for at the Ivy Leagues, majoring in English Lit for? To knock your head against the wall constantly trying to convince the public that these breath mints are really different and superior to thousands of exactly similar products on the market?

Sooner or later the question comes: Is this all there is? The answer the ruling block who head corporations is, no. The institutional way they try to find "greater fulfilment," is to sponsor cultural events, to try to become gods of culture. After all, was there ever a god of candy?

The corporate response has devastating social consequences, as Naomi Klein lays out in the form of plant closures and massive layoffs (often demanded by shareholders), deindustrialization, offshoring, "sweatshop" conditions abroad, the descent of sectors of the population into poverty and homelessness, and the like. But corporate sponsorship also has "spiritual" consequences, in that this form of immortality-seeking (as all forms of immortality-seeking) needs as its fuel the life-force of others. At what price, immortality?

Corporate sponsorship then, as the end result of branding, in addition to the practical social consequences referred to, also plays a part in impeding individuals and communities from finding their own souls.

wingedcentaur

2010-03-23T19:38:00.000-07:00

Good Evening Friends,

I want to pick up on the thread from yesterday. I can't resist.

As you knew prior to this blog, no doubt, and as we have learned and are learning, there are many, many ways to analyze the political economy: different schools of thought depending on political ideology, "left, right, and center," as it were; different disciplinary approaches, in general terms, quantitative or qualitative in nature; different indices, I believe the term is, that are examined and given more or less weight; different assessment of specific problems, their origin, their nature, and prescriptions for their solution.

And so on and so forth.

There are many different approaches to formulating class theory, as far as how the economic classes relate to each other and the world. We are specifically concerned, here, with how the ruling class, the bourgeoisie relate to each other and the world.

Our approach is literary-mythological-philosophical and it is based on the God-drive. Man is the desire to become God. It is the central idea supporting every argument I have made and, I think, will make in this blog.

If one looks at the corporate world, you can say that they, as a whole, are trying to become gods. I said so yesterday with respect to the recently passed "historic" healthcare legislation, which contains the mandate. All Americans will be required to purchase corporate health insurance (Remember that even the "robust public option" was eliminated).

I said that there will come a time - if it hasn't come already- when, deep in the mythological imagination of the collective consciousness of this sector of the bourgeoisie, they come to see themselves as our very life-givers and sustainers. Gods of medicine and health. Apollo, Dionysus.

The ruling class are trying to become other kinds of gods. The best way I can bring this home is to use Olympian terms. Some of the corporate bourgeoisie want to become Gods of War. Think of Blackwater and Dyncorp and Halliburton and other military contractors. Ares, Athena.

Some of them try to become elemental gods: oil, water, electricity, coal. The utility companies and "Big Oil" corporations. We might think of Poseidon and Zeus, here. When this "green" economy takes off, no doubt these corporate elemental gods will take on solar and wind aspects. Hydroelectric power makes one think of a fusion of Poseidon and Zeus.

Some of them want to become gods of "wisdom," or learning. Think of the parent company of any charter school or private school. I believe Athena and Apollo were, both, also divinities of wisdom.

Some of them want to be gods of the land, agricultural abundance. Archer Daniels Midland. The Supermarket to the World. Big corporate, heavily state-subsized agribusiness. I'm sure there's at least one god for this from the pantheon, but my Greek mythology isn't all it could be. I think Apollo, again, as the sun-god has a role to play.....

Some of them want to become gods of communication. All you have to do is recall the telecommunications act that Clinton signed taking off the antitrust limitations on media consolidation, and the handful of corporate conglomerates that were the main beneficiaries. One thinks of the fleet-footed Hermes.

What about finance? What is the relationship of the bankers and financial institutions to the rest of the economic ruling class? I like to think of Hephaestus (I believe that is how the name is spelled), the forge of the gods in the Greek pantheon. Hephaestus was a very important god. He made the thunder bolts of Zeus; the sun rays and chariots of Apollo; the weapons and armor of Athena. And so on.

Hephaestus enabled the gods in a very important way. His creations helped the other gods extend their power. This has certainly been one of the traditional roles of the bankers, which is so obvious as to preclude any need for comment. Finance and industrial companies intermingle. Production-based companies engage in finance as a means of making money, when their product isn't doing so well on the free market, for whatever reason. Financial institutions buy companies to acutally produce physical goods and services.

In all mythologies there is a trickster god, who works his mischief on both gods and mortal alike. For example, it is said that the financial institutions, in collusion with the bond rating agencies, certainly "put one over" on various large sized institutional investors of one kind or another, with the bundled, "toxic" subprime mortgage -backed securities.

There is a wonderful quote I need to retrieve from Naomi Klein's tenth anniversay edition of her book, NoLogo about branding, and specifically the God-drive present in corporate sponsorship of cultural events.

Let me just end with this. All of these things I've mentioned, are a corruption of the God-drive.*

wingedcentaur

2010-03-22T20:26:00.000-07:00

Good Evening Friends,

I will pick up on the thread I was following another time. Now just want to say a word about this healthcare bill, passed by the House of Representatives. It is my understanding that if the Senate passes the bill with no changes, it will be delivered to president Obama's desk, where it will get his signature.

The feature that bothers me the most is this mandate. People have to buy the private health insurance companies product. If they don't, they will face fines. Many of you will disagree but I do not think it is hyperbole to say that it is a tax of human beings for living. I am less interested in critiquing the legislation from a left political point of view, than in considering how this mandate fits into the basic theme we have been developing over this blog, and which can be summed up in one sentence: Man is the desire to become God.

Needless to say that there is not even a "robust public option." In any event, "God," as I have mentioned a time or two before, is not the ultimate owner of all wealth and all authority, not by virtue of being a capitalist or a democrat (small d). These things are "His" as a result of God being God, the creator and sustainer of the universe and all life in it, and so forth.

"He" does not have to submit himself to "free market" principles or parliamentary procedures. The ruling class seek to duplicate for themselves this state of affairs, as much as possible. This is the God-drive, if you will. We all have it and it expresses itself in a near infinity of ways, good, bad, and indifferent. Hold that thought.

Now, the bill does offer improvements to the healthcare situation. Insurers will no longer be able to deny coverage for pre-existing conditions. They will no longer be able to throw people off coverage for chronic illness. They have to pay out a significantly larger share of their profits to paying out claims, and so forth.

Minor hiccups for them. Inconveniences. For example, I'm sure these corporations will develop derivative instruments to "spread the risk" of those policy holders. But the profits will be spectacular, dazzling, stupendous, and so forth. The thing is the power!

Power is infinitely more important to the bourgeoisie than money. Think of it, just by being alive and living in America, we are required to pay tribute to them! And I know that deep within the mythological imagination of this section of the bourgeoisie, as a result of this, they will come to see themselves as our sustainers, and in time our authors. Remember I said that since Man is the desire to become God, corporations want to displace and become, not destroy, goverment; and government wants the church to say they are divinely authorized. But do to this "revolving door" of Washington, government and the corporate boardroom are increasingly intertwined.

Any minor abrogations on profits going forward for the insurance companies, through some technical policies, will be magnificently outweighed by the euphoria of the realization of the God-drive for them. Indeed, this may even cause them to be more "generous." Perhaps they won't work so hard to deny people coverage and throw people off coverage for pre-existing conditions and chronic illness. Perhaps they will come to think they can be divinely magnanimous.

It could happen. Maybe.

Good Night

wingedcentaur

2010-03-14T09:09:00.000-07:00

Friends,

Previously, before talking about Calvinism, we were talking about the relationship of finance to the real economy. I compared it to the metabolism of the body. Finance is the metabolism and the real economy is the body.

Just as the metabolism has to work harder when the quality and/or quantity of nutrients are lacking, so too is it for finance with respect to the real economy.

We also said that the system goes through its cycles of anorexia/bulimia. The system periodically looks at itself in the mirror and says "I'm too fat," no matter how virtually skeletal it is, and goes on a severe austerity program. This means a wave of "entitlement reform," in other words, heavy cuts in all manner of social spending, public infrastructure, perhaps, tax raises (but not on the rich because they might leave the jurisdiction and take all their jobs with them), and cuts in other kinds of public services.

The anorexic will swim for ten miles, get on the treadmill for two hours, walk another twenty miles, do a thousand jumping jacks.

We also said, previously, that finance, as an entity can be compared to some kind of intelligent, slug-like creatures, who move from body to body, parasitic on it but also making the body capable of superhuman strength and speed. We find this theme, often in science fiction. There is a science fiction writer called Octavia E. Butler who wrote among many other works, Wildseed and Mind of My Mind, that featured a character called Doro (who was not a slug but a disembodied human consciousness) who functioned in a vaguely, somewhat similar way. He had no body of his own, it was slain when he was a very young boy, but his mind survived. He was a kind of psychic vampire, in a way.

Anyway, even though I can't think of an exactly proper example right now, I'm sure you know that this is a feature in some science fiction and fantasy. But the parasite enables the body to perform at such a level because it makes its nervous system work in a radically different way; and consequently, the smart slugs burn through the bodies very rapidly, and in a matter of weeks or months, the slugs have to find new bodies. They have to constantly hop from body to body. Keep that in mind.

We used this analogy to suggest that when two people debate economics with one another, oftentimes they are having two different conversations at the same time. There is a difference between a strong, dynamic economy and a healthy one. The two are actually not necessarily the same. To know this is true all we have to do, as I mentioned before, is to think about a 6'8, 385lb NFL offensive lineman. He is chiseled. He is thoroughly ripped and cut. He is outwardly impressive, massively powerful, unstoppable and so forth.

Suppose we learn that he's using steroids. He can train much harder and longer, of course. He can recover much more quickly that he would have been able to do without them. His muscles are like steel. He becomes a legend. Outwardly, he is a tower of power, the "very picture of health." What can possibly be wrong with such a specimen?

But the steroid wreck havoc with his hormones, cause impotence. They may weaken his bones, cause kidney failure and so forth. We understand that sooner or later the internal decay will bring him down.

Hurricane Katrina and the fallen bridge in Minnesota were examples of the effects of increasing internal decay, even though the American economy seemed exceptionally dynamic during the 1990s. Outwardly the economy was dynamic but unhealthy. The bones and internal organs of the state grew weaker. So, a moderate hurricane hit New Orleans and the levies broke and the event was more calamitous than it needed to be, by everyone's agreement. A bridge falls in Minnesota. And so on and so forth.

In the next post we're going to talk a little about finance as a body-possessing, sentient slug, who moves from body to body; relate this to the John Bellamy Foster article in Monthly Review concerning the age of monopoly finance capital; and then use these conclusions to evaluate "new world order" theory.

wingedcentaur

2010-03-14T04:32:00.000-07:00

Good Morning Friends,

And now a word about Calvinism in America.

"Looking west, the early settlers saw not the promise of abundance, only a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men. In the gloom of the old-growth forests and surrounded by the indigenous '"wild men,"' the settlers must have felt as hemmed in as they had been in crowded England. And if Calvinism offered no individual reassurance, it at least exalted the group, the congregation. You might not be saved yourself, but you were part of a social entity set apart by its rigorous spiritual discipline - and set above all those who were unclean, untamed, and unchurched" (Barbara Ehrenreich. Bright-Sided: How The Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt & Company. New York, 2009. p.78).

A grim picture, that. But wait, "the sun'll come out tomorrow..."

"In the early nineteenth century, the cloud's of Calvinist gloom were just beginning to break. Forests were yielding to roads and eventually railroads. The native peoples slunk westward or succumbed to European diseases. With the nation rapidly expanding, fortunes could be made overnight, or just as readily lost. In this tumultous new age of possibility, people of all sorts began to reimagine the human condition and reject the punitive religion of their forebears (Ehrenreich, p.78). And this environment gave rise to New Thought or the New Thought Movement (p.79).

Isn't this the way capitalism behaves generally? Take the first quote. The capitalists rather sullenly go about the business of producing surplus product or profit with the limited resources available to them. When one thing or another happens to exponentially expand the availability of either natural resources and/or markets or some new invention comes along, the system gets giddy. The propaganda overtakes the actual worth of the content, bubbles occur.

Can't countries be said, in their founding, to go through development bubbles? This time it will be different. We'll never fall off. Our glory shall be everlasting.

"Elements of Calvinism, without the theology persisted and even flourished in American culture well into the late twentieth century and beyond. The middle and upper classes came to see busyness for its own sake as a mark of status in the 1980s and 1990s, which was convenient, because employers were demanding more and more of them, especially once new technologies ended the division between work and private life: the cell phone is always within reach; the laptop comes home every evening. "'Multitasking'" entered the vocabulary , along with the new problem of '"workaholism"' (Ehrenreich, p.76).

"While earlier elites had flaunted their leisure, the comfortable classes of our own time are eager to display evidence of their exhaustion - always '"in the loop,"' always available for the conference call, always ready to go '"the extra mile"' (p.76).

Let me suggest something to you: the very nature of capitalism today, with finance, even speculative finance, so dominant, suggests the influence of both Calvinism and radical anti-Calvinism at the same time. In other words, finance and the propaganda that props up its legitimacy represent "work" without the work.

In addition to the manipulations we've touched on by the financial sector and so forth, there is also the collusion of the government branch of the bourgeoisie.

One aspect of what Kevin Phillips called "Bullnomics" is ".. the warping since the 1990s, by some arguments, intentional, of the collection and presentation of U.S. economic data to make it more market-supportive" (Kevin Phillips. Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and The Global Crisis of American Capitalism. Viking,, 2008, pp.79-80). Also, a guy won the Nobel Prize in economics, proclaiming that unrestricted short selling was necessary for efficient markets (pp.77-78).

Academia helped out with the Efficient Market Hypothesis: the idea that at every moment shares priced themselves in the market by attracting the input of all information relevant to their value. Further price changes depended on further information. And Modern Portfolio Theory emphasized that it was less risky to invest in the entire spectrum of stocks instead of trying to pick them one by one (Phillips. Bad Money, p.74).

The elite propagated an ethos of market populism which seemed to provide a radical re-categorization of reality. All workers became '"businesspeople."' There was "one dollar, one vote" nonsense, and the "market consensus" was made to seem the high point of Western Civilization (p.75). In the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s stock market averages were driven by high levels of mergers, reorganizations, and leveraged buyouts, and "under the new Internal Revenue provisions of the 1980s, debt seemed rational from a tax standpoint, rather than immoral and indulgent" (Phillips, Bad Money, pp.75-76).

In other words, no real value was added for all that frantic activity. To continue.

"That same decade [the 80s] saw corporate raiders posture as outsiders tackling a bloated '"corpocracy,"' as promoters of the ability of the small to challenge the big, and as standard-bearers of a '"a democratization of capital"' that unlocked shareholder value" (p.76). Stock indexes rose as did fees and profits as a result of these manipulations. Speculators enjoyed a new respectability for the way they made markets efficient by helping them assimilate new information, and by providing liquidity when needed, and so forth. Hedge funds mushroomed. Assets under management rose from several hundred billion in 1997 to 1.81 trillion in late 2007; but this underestimated their value because leverage increased it by "some disconcerting multiplier" (Phillips, Bad Money, p.77).

Derivatives. Many of them had been pioneered by "mathmaticians and other academics," who invoked efficiency theory to proclaim them a "reliable and essential risk management tools" (Phillips, p.77). To return to statistics a moment, the government plays game with measuring the rate of inflation as well as the true unemployment rate (pp.80-89). Goverment also seems to make desperate claims about the volume of trade.*

Taken together, don't these things point to the bourgeoisie, as a whole, under the influence of both Calvinism and radical anti-Calvinism simultaneously? The forsaking of the blase making of stuff combined with its replacement with virtual economic activity, which implores "God" (Yes, God. Remember greed always comes from fear) to bless them, that they deserved to be blessed, based on their "productivity," the great wealth they have "created." Work without work.

wingedcentaur

2010-03-13T15:36:00.000-08:00

Good Evening Friends,

I hope you are all safe and warm during this small or minor hurricane.

I would like to pick up on a point, with some amplification, that I made before. I said that, historically, wherever we look and wherever there was an advanced, monetarized economy, you saw a disdain of the merchants/moneylender coming from the elite of society, even though this commerce sector helped the aristocracy accumulate their wealth. I talked about what I consider to be the reason for this. This is certainly true for the west, as we shall see in more detail, and Christianity might have been a contributing factor; but what accounts for the universality of this tendency?

In China during the period called the "age of warring states," of the 4th and 3rd centuries B.C., these events culminated in the establishment of the Ch'in empire in 221 B.C., which ruled over more people than the Roman hegemony ever did (Harman, Chris. A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium. Verso. London, New York, 1999. p.55). The class that seems to have done the most to make this achievement possible were the "big merchant entrepreneurs. This was a new social class within a new social formation (Chris Harman, p.56).

Harman said that the influence of the merchants was powerful, proof of this being that the richest of them became chancellor to the future emperor in 250 B.C. He was given land comprising 100,000 households and surrounded himself with an entourage of 3,000 scholars (p.57).

My view is that he and others like him were probably "tokens," a select few whom the powers-that-be of the state - that branch of the aristocratic bourgeoisie - thought could be spruced up and made presentable.

Because, at the same time the state relentlessly attacked the merchants, as Harman points out, under the Ch'in and Han dynasties (206 B.C. to 220 A.D.). The first Han emperor, for example, did not allow the merchants to wear silk or ride in carriages. Neither their children nor their grandchildren were allowed to serve in government. The state took direct control of the salt and iron industries in order to ensure the profits were monopolized by the empire to suppress '"rich traders and rich merchants.'" Furthermore, higher taxes were levied on trading profits than on agriculture; and the wealth of merchants who were found trying to evade taxes was confiscated. The state's contention, in official document after official document, that these measures were taken in defense of the poor, are the kind of predictable self justification that we really should not take seriously (Chris Harman, p.57).

By the late Sung period there was a shift in the attitude of the state toward the merchants. Many of the restrictions that had previously controlled their behavior had fallen into disuse. And yet, a representative of the old guard, who pinned for the good old days could complain about the lack of "'control over the merchants. They enjoy a luxurious way of life, living on dainty foods of delicious rice and meat, owning handsome houses and many carts, adorning their wives and children with pearls and jade, and dressing their slaves in white silk. In the morning they think about how to make a fortune, and in the evening they devise means of fleecing the poor'" (p.112).

Now, surely this high official who made this remark, was living exactly this lifestyle himself, if not to an even higher degree of excess. What's going on here? This remark reminds me of that scene in the movie The Godfather and the novel, when Don Corleones oldest son, Santino (Sonny), who presiding over the "family business," while Vito Corleone recovers from his gunshot wounds.

The Godfather is shot because of his refusal to become involved in the narcotics trade, which the other families are eager to participate in, in partnership with a man called Sollozo. Vito Corleones refusal is taken to be an impediment to the business opportunities of the other families. A coalition seems to have authorized the attempted but failed hit on The Godfather. Sonny expresses his determination to be avenged. He is willing to go to war with all the other Five Families of New York and completely paralyze "business" until they hand over Sollozo.

As all the families are at war with each other, "going to the mattresses" and so forth, control over the numbers running operations in New York have grown lax. Too many low-level hoods have grabbed up too much control of these various street-level gambling ventures. Santino talks about the blacks "up in Harlem" having a good time driving around in their big cars and the like, their heads and egos swelled with their seemingly new found wealth and power. It was time to decisively re-establish the firm guiding hand of the Corleone Family.

So, the high official of the late Sung period and Sonny Corleone are both saying that the new people were getting "too big for their britches."

When the Arab empire was a century old the non-Arab Muslims were the majority population in the cities and the key to its industry and trade - which the Arab merchants had abandoned to become a new, wealthy, leisure class. Even though these non-Arabs had growing influence as administrators, they were still discriminated against in different ways (Harman, A People's History of the World, p.128).

I would guess, here, that these groups were discriminated against, at least as much for being merchants as for being non-Arabs, maybe even more so in reality.

Chris Harman wrote: "The Abbasid revolution created space for the expansion of trade and enabled the urban middle classes to influence the functioning of the state. But real power remained with groups which were still essentially parasitic on production carried out by others. The royal court increasingly adopted the traditional trappings of an oriental monarchy, with vast expenditures designed to feed the egos of its rulers and to impress its subjects" (p.131).

One of those "trappings of an oriental monarchy" was the ideology of divine justification of their rule and the prerogatives they were able to arrogate unto themselves as a result. The existence of a merchant/moneylender class, too visibly prominent, tended to put some tarnish to this self-image.

Now let's go back to Calvinism in America.

wingedcentaur

2010-03-11T04:08:00.000-08:00

Good Morning Friends,

All of my references for this post will come from the book, Bright-Sided: How The Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America by Barbara Ehrenreich. Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company. New York, 2009.

We're going to talk about the relationship between Calvinism and capitalism, discussed in chapter three of Ehrenreich's book, labelled "The Dark Roots of American Optimism." As you know, I've been saying that capitalism, despite all outward appearances, is an economic system somewhat reluctantly created by the upper classes and definitely reluctantly engaged in by the rest of us - but we'll come to that another time.

The thesis of the book is very well captured in the subtitle: how the relentless promotion of positive thinking (both religious and secular) has undermined America. This is not the place to discuss the argument, which I am entirely in sympathy with, by the way. But Ehrenreich opens chapter three with a question. Why did Americans, in such large numbers, adopt the uniquely sunny, self-gratifying view of the world?

Answer: because they had tried its opposite, Calvinism, and rejected it - sort of. The white settlers who came to New England brought the harsh, unforgiving ideology of Calvinism with them. Ehrenreich quotes literary scholar, Ann Douglas in saying that its God was '"utterly lawless,"' an all-powerful entity who '"reveals his hatred of his creatures, not his love for them,"' (pp.74-75).

This Calvinist God maintained a heaven but spaces for departed souls were limited. Those who got in had been selected before birth through a process called predestination. The job for the living was to constantly examine the '"loathsome abominations that lie in the bosom,"' in order to uproot sinful thoughts that are a sure sign of damnation. The only relief (not salvation because one never knew) was labor of the spiritual or physical type, such as building up farms and businesses. Idleness and pleasure seeking was considered a deep sin (p.75).

The exhortation to meditate daily, hourly, about what a sinful, wicked creature man is, that got himself expelled from the Garden of Eden is the infinite version of the classic upper middle class dictum of a parent who banished her child to her room for some infraction to "think about what you've done." Only, think about it FOREVER!

Let me say, here, this was the formal doctrine of Calvinism. This is what people were required to say they believed. I could be wrong but I can't imagine that individuals, within the privacy of their own self-image, being anything but confident of their own place in heaven (either that they are one of the predestined or that surely The Lord would open up just one more space for them). I understand that the work, physical and spiritual (but then again, as we know much physical work is spiritual or ideological) serves as repentance, a kind of self-flagellation. But wouldn't they have done so, holding out the hope, that each of them like Job (not employment but the man called 'Job' in the Bible) would be restored to glory and prosperity through their faithfulness? Of course the road would be hard and fraught with peril and all that, and so on and so forth. There undoubtedly would be much fear involved. Remember I told you, in thinking about the GREED of Wall Street and the like, that greed always comes from fear. This is a part of the legacy of Calvinism in America. We exist without justification and therefore we are the desire to become God, to assure ourselves that either God or some aspects of infinite capacity exist, so that we can know that we are "doing the right thing" in life. One thing was certain, if you weren't "productive" surely you were marked as one of the damned.

What would be the real purpose of all that industry otherwise? Ehrenreich makes reference to a book, which I must read sometime, called Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Max Weber. She says that the thesis of the book is that capitalism has its roots in the grim, punitive outlook of Calvinist Protestantism, which required people to defer gratification and resist all pleasurable temptations in favor of hard work and the accumulation of wealth (p.8).

You know, I said I was going to stick to one book in this post. But I should have known I was telling a lie. But in chapter nine of his book Wealth and Democracy (2002) Kevin Phillips refers to a book by Edward Chancellor called Devil Take the Hindmost - which I had heard of before but had mistakenly thought was an old English literary novel or epic poem like Milton's Paradise Lost. But no, it is a history of financial speculation.

It seems that the stock market, itself, is gambling. It has its roots in carnivals, gambling, and other "frolics." What Phillips calls the "dignity and hierarchy," "16th century equivalent of pinstripes" was nowhere to be seen. Phillips quoted the English historian Simon Schama, who observed about the early Amsterdam stock exchange, for example, that '"such was its reputation as an undignified bazaar that the great lords of capital who themselves enjoyed substantial dividend income from share trading disdained to set foot in the place, delegating the daily business of buying and selling to professional brokers."' Until the London financial boom of the 1690s, Phillips says, the word 'broker' meant "procurer" or "pimp." And so-called blue chip stocks take their name from the color of the most expensive chips in the Monte Carlo casinos (p.347).

Now, as you know, in addition to the traditional New Money/Old Money dynamic, which seems to have been universal, remarkably so, there is the traditional distaste that the upper classes, the levels of aristocracy and monarchy, and so forth, have invariably shown to the merchant/moneylender sector, apart from the New Money/Old Money paradigm, somewhat. This is so even though the moneylenders were a crucial tool in helping the upper classes accumulate their own wealth. This is so, for this overtly commercial sector (and that is the key word 'overtly'). This is so no matter how wealthy they were; in fact, I think that the wealthier they moneylenders were, the more they were disdained by the upper classes. In other words, I think the wealth of the overtly commercial sector may have had an inverse relationship to their social acceptance within the upper levels of society. And this is so no matter where we look.

Why?

Because no one wants his plumbing to show. No one wants the pipes and fixtures visible. It is aesthetically unacceptable. These fixtures must be concealed behind walls. Similarly, I think, the overtly commercial sector was the plumbing, the actual organs of wealth accumulation of the elites, made obscenely visible. The richer these people became the more prominently, and obscenely - from the point of view of the elites - they were, the more they refuted the elite's view of themselves that they would have liked to hold on to. You see, the very existence of the commerce sector refuted the myth that a certain elect of humanity were super wealthy almost beyond imagining because it is the will of God; in this view, the aristocracy and monarchy are where they are by divine favor, certainly nothing so tawdry as capitalism.

The merchant/moneylender class internalized this feeling, of course, and developed a kind of inferiority complex. They tried to relieve this by redeeming, if you will, of their families and themselves, by marrying off their children into "older," "more established" families, preferably those with titles.

This kind of thing was certainly going on in the 1920s, with American parents of aspiring debutantes sending photos of their daughters to magazines in England, France, and Italy that covered the international society beat. The publication of these photos signalled that the girls were open to wooing from European men, preferably those with titles. The situation was one in which "more than a few" European men, members of the minor nobility who were "pecuniarily embarassed," [I suppose this means they lost it all to speculation] - were seeking rich American heiresses for marriage (Larry Samuel. Rich: The Rise and Fall of American Wealth Culture. Amacom - American Management Association, 2009. pp. 57-58).

This is an arrangement in which both parties gain. The broke aristocrat would gain money - albeit by marrying someone he probably wouldn't have given a second look, in class terms, under normal circumstances - and thus re-establishes an integrated view of himself as set apart from the unwashed masses in glory and wealth. The family of the rich, New Money heiress, would gain "respectability."

Let's proceed. Again, with Phillips. In northern Europe, around 1500, financial markets followed seasonal fairs all around. Medina del Campo, which Kevin Phillips says was the de facto financial capital of sixteenth century Spain, was where royal bankers went to pay the king's debts and arrange his loans. These fairs were popular gatherings were granted exemptions by the church (an elite institution at that time, after all) on trade and finance. By the late seventeenth century the carnival was in decline and was replaced by permanent stock exchanges (Wealth and Democracy, p.348).

In such an environment anything and everything seems possible, anything and everything seems negotiable, anything and everything might be bought, anything and everything, and perhaps everyone seems to have "his price." Even the forgiveness of sins could be bought, even spiritual absolution. It's important to note, here, that John Calvin was born in 1509 and died in 1564, and he reacted to this corruption, as it seemed, to him, to manifest itself in the church. He did not want to start a social revolution or anything radical like that.

So, we see that financialization has a very long pedigree. Perhaps it rose up right alongside capitalism from the beginning. And so, ideologically, Calvinism, then, would tend to turn people away from the faux production of this "virtual" capitalism, to concrete production, to "real" economic activity. Today, in the aftermath of this crisis, we see and hear various commentators on the political economy calling for the re-regulation of financial markets; and this might be understood as an attempted reimposition of financial and economic (because remember, non-industrial firms also tend to lose their discipline and engage in an excessive amount of - as Kevin Phillips has also termed it - "paper entrepreneurialism) Calvinism.

Let's go to another post and finish up with Calvinism in America.

wingedcentaur

2010-03-09T04:28:00.000-08:00

Good Morning Friends,

I want to make a brief interruption of our present mode of analysis to mention Barbara Ehrenreich's book, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America (Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt & Company, New York, 2009). This book, particularly the chapter called "The Dark Roots of American Optimism," will be very helpful to our understanding.

I have been laying out the highly counterintuitive thesis that the capitalist ruling class actually does not like capitalism very much; and they view it, in fact, as a lower form of existence, like the "agents" in The Matrix. They desperately seek to escape this form of existence, after all the kings and aristocracy of old did not have to toil in order to be wealthy, to own practically all the wealth of the land, in fact. They were wealthy simply by virtue of their position.

I have been saying that capitalism is a system reluctantly constructed by the western ruling classes, though I admit I am not yet clear as to the precise political history. It would seem from the outside that capitalism has enriched them marvelously; but I don't think they necessarily see it that way. It's nothing like the serious wealth to be gained from a return, as much as possible, to the conditions that allowed the monarchs and aristocracy to have their staggering wealth. Remember that list I cited from the Wall Street Journal (1999) from Kevin Phillips book, Wealth and Democracy, of the fifty riches people of the previous thousand years? Most were kings, popes, bankers to kings and popes, traders under official license, conqueror-rulers. Only one, Bill Gates, was an actual capitalist, barely, but will come back to that.

Their visible dislike of capitalism is manifest in the traditional, worldwide sociological New Money-Old Money tension. I have said that New Money always wants to become Old Money, just as quickly as possible - which is why they practice capitalism as viciously as they do. They want to grow really rich as soon as possible so that they may expand into the realm of Old Money, free at last, as soon as possible. Financialization, I said, is one way of achieving this as quickly as possible, of "aging" their wealth as soon as possible. I said that when capitalism hits its natural limits to expansion, one of two modalities are triggered, so it seems to me: virtual and disaster capitalisms. Financialization is virtual capitalism.

Anyway, we'll talk a little about what Ehrenreich has to say about Calvinism next time.

wingedcentaur

2010-03-04T17:19:00.000-08:00

Friends,

This talk of steroids leads us into the third prong of this particular cycle of analysis. At the end of it we are going to consider the abstract universal human quality of nationalism, and ask if all of the socioeconomic classes feel equally bound by nationalism. We also want to put this into context of something called the New World Order idea. This, I think, is usually ignored by most of the left as "conspiracy theory." But let us see if we can establish a hypothetical basis for it.

In his article in the monthly review, John Bellamy Foster summarized the findings of Paul Sweezy and another scholar called Harry Magdoff on the matter of credit: "Among the forces countering the tendency to stagnation, none has been more important or less understood by economic analysts than the growth, beginning in the 1960s and rapidly gaining momentum after the severe recession of the mid-1970s, of the country's debt structure (government, corporate, and individual) at a pace far exceeding the sluggish expansion of the underlying 'real' economy. The result has been the emergence of an unprecedentedly huge and fragile financial superstructure subject to the stresses and strains that increasingly threaten the stability of the economy as a whole."

Now, we have already talked about credit as the great enabling mechanism of class mimicry. Let's take our friend, the six-foot, three hundred pound man. We have him in the room, with no food but water, and we're making him do exercises. Suppose now we ease up on him a little. Every fourth day we give him a bucket of fried chicken. Every third day after that we give him a three liter bottle of grape soda and a jumbo bag of cheeseburger-flavored Doritos (Yes, they make cheeseburger-flavored Doritos, now!). And suppose we let him have some amphetamines or other chemical stimulants to keep our guy going, to take his mind off the fact that he is still being very, very poorly nourished, and rested for that matter.

Again, in the article, Foster wrote: "Economic stagnation, in this sense, should not be confused with technological or consumer-product stagnation. Indeed, the constant development of the technology of production that characterizes capitalism in general (including its monopoly stage) only increases the productive potential of the system, intensifying its overaccumulation tendencies. The system could concievably be rescued from its economic doldrums under these circumstances by the appearance of an epoch-making innovation on the scale of the steam engine, the railroad, and the automobile, in terms of total economic-geographical effects - generating a vast demand for new investment, independent of existing income constraints. Yet no such epoch-making innovation, Baran and Sweezy argued, was on the horizon.

Very good. Now let's turn to our third metaphorical analogy in this analysis. We should think of the elite finance sector as a whole (non-financial industrial firms also engage in financial speculation as well) like a sentient, slug-like, human body possessing, well, slug. This self-aware organism, that usually looks like a head of brocoli, enables the human body, it possesses, to perform superhuman feats of strength and speed, by making its metabolism and nervous system work very differently than it normally would.

As a result, the symbiot literally takes many decades off the life of the human being, as the creature uses up the body at a vastly accelerated rate. When the body is all burned up, the symbiot must move on and possess another body.

"... in terms of total economic geographical effects - generating a vast demand for new investment, independent of existing income constraints. Yet no such epoch-making innovation, Baran and Sweezy argued, was on the horizon."

The financial sector, as a whole, is like such a sentient, body possessing, slug-like creature, enabling the U.S. economy to perform remarkable feats of external dynamism, vigor, and power, all while inexorably undermining its health.

To be continued.

wingedcentaur

2010-03-04T16:58:00.000-08:00

Guess who?

You know, there is something else that could be appreciated more, I think, and that there was absolutely no sight of in the nineties.

There is a difference between a strong economy and a healthy economy. I'm really not playing games with semantics. A strong economy and a healthy one might be one in the same, but not necessarily so.

There is a difference between a strong economy and a healthy economy; in the same way there is a difference between a man of bulging muscles, steroided-up, who can benchpress five hundred pounds in the gym; and another man, healthy, who may or may not be able to do the same.

I understand anabolic steroids have distressing consequences for the internal health of an individual: hormonal imbalance, impotency, organ damage, and the like. As you are hyped up on the 'roids, you may not notice as early as you might otherwise do, that you liver and kidneys are shutting down, your heart is growing larger, and so forth. You are so charged with you external physical power, that your muscle-bound triumphalism masks the inner decay.

So, for example, emphasis on the appearance of external dynamism (any way it could be managed), contributes to, or at least, blinds one to internal decay; just as over-devotion to the "free market" caused the bones of the state to grow more and more brittle, as nobody seemed to notice; and therefore, that bridge in Minnesota collapses and a moderate hurricane struck New Orleans, and the levies broke, allowing for far more injury, loss of life, and property damage than was necessary. And we always hear how the American public transport system, especially the trains, are relics compared to the European and Japanese systems. And on and on, so on and so forth.

wingedcentaur

2010-03-04T16:09:00.001-08:00

Friends,

You know, in the nineties, there was a formula I used to hear people use to describe themselves politically. They would say: "I'm a social liberal and a fiscal conservative." Remember that? However, that can't be right! This is impossible, in fact.

If you look carefully at what they meant by 'social' I think you will find that the word is 'legal.' They should say that they are fiscal conservatives, social moderate/conservatives, and legal liberals. One supposes legal liberals would be for things like: Affirmative Action, Gay Rights (including the right for gays to serve openly in the U.S. military), Abortion Rights, Muticulturalism, Path-to-Legalization of undocumented workers, and the like.

What makes these things legal instead of social, is the fact that one's advocacy of them does not require the public treasury to spend money to address these problems. All that is presumably required is an elevating of the public "consciousness," and so forth. There is no need or desire to call for economic justice to address these, real concerns. Indeed, in the nineties, the concept of economic justice had no place in the neoliberal consensus in the nineties, or at any other time of the sway of the Washington Consensus.

But when we talk about homelessness, joblessness, the need to bolster public education (social liberal/fiscal conservatives drift into the rightward direction of school vouchers), the growing income and wealth gap between the haves and have-nots, the minimum wage (and how about a living wage?), and the like, we are getting into an area of public policy that asks the public treasury to spend money to fix these problems. But such social spending runs counter to the fiscal conservatism of the social liberal/fiscal conservatives. It was in the nineties, remember, when we first began to hear the gentler term - for giving the shaft to the poor and working class - of "entitlement reform."

It was these "socially liberal/fiscally conservative" creatures who popularized that term, if I'm not mistaken, centrist Democratic National Committee types. This distinction is important, because, as I said, the concept of economic justice was nonexistent in the prevailing ideology of the go-go nineties. Nineteen nineties, that is. It was all about economic freedom. Freedom would somehow make the free market just, and so forth. Their fiscal conservatism, left or right, put much more focus on paying down the national debt, balancing the budget, making up revenue shortfalls, and the like.

This distillation of legal liberalism is significant, too, because Slavoj Zizek (remember, the Slovenian philosopher I told you about?) says that what is wrong with the left's response to capitalism today, in general, is its narrowly legalistic terms, which fails to ask the big, basic questions anymore about income distribution, natural resources, what should the allocation of public funds be, how should workplaces be organized, and so forth.

wingedcentaur

2010-03-04T14:24:00.001-08:00

Friends,

I know of no clinical psychological study concerning the effects of starvation on an individual. Probably only the Nazis did such things. But what if we took a six-foot tall, three hundred pound man, somewhat flabby, and put him into a room, without food of any kind but we'll be nice and give him water. Suppose we required him to do regular calisthenics (this exercise should be considered analogous to the invariably rising productivity of the workers even in the midst of downsizings with flat wages but rising profits for executives.

So, our guy is locked in a room with only water, no food, and yet required to exercise. The total absence of food should be equated with deindustrialization, no inputs. There might come a point as the starved, exercising body strips away most of the fat and muscle definition is at its height. At this point he might look into the window and say to himself: "Damn, I'm ripped! I am so cut!"

This small window of euphoria is analagous to the height of some kind of national "bubble," that is before the process of starvation marches on and continues to eat away muscle, then bone, then nerve fiber, and the like, until death. A bubble is junk food, the substitution of real productive value with hype about "The Next Big Thing." One could say that what keeps the U.S. economy going in the midst of deindustrialization, are the bubbles of various kinds.

What about capitalism's anorexic/bulimic tendencies? The system tends to look at itself in the mirror and say: "I'm fat!!" then goes running for fifteen miles, swims endless laps around an Olympic size pool, runs on the treadmill for two hours, does aerobics, paints the garage, and then eats a bowl of soup. This mere bowl of broth symbolizes the severe pairing back of social spending by the government during times of crisis when state, local, and the federal government don't collect as much taxes from the financial sector, whom it may have to rescue for some reason or other.

This anorexia is also exemplified in the way in which private industry seems to relentlessly offshore plants, put downward pressure on wages and benefits of workers, and so forth to "trim the fat," and do whatever they have to do to "reduce labor costs," as well as shareholder return. That is also the bowl of soup. But productivity must go up, working hours must go up. This is the torturous, self-flagellating exercise regimen.

But the system also likes to "binge and purge." The system goes into paroxysms and gorge itself on the next big thing or bubble. In this phase the system doesn't even bother looking at itself in the mirror. It runs to the bathroom, sticks its finger down its throat and purges.... productive capacity overseas to various locations where labor costs are much lower and health and human safety standards are much more relaxed - like the anorexic, afraid of putting on weight.

But this constant self-induced vomitting, I hear, brings up stomach acid which wears away at the lining of the throat.

Let's return to the "dual reality" John Bellamy Foster referred to, of stagnant growth on the one hand, and the fact of, the way ".... the system has found new ways of reproducing itself,..." Stagnation and financialization which gives capitalism its appearance of dynamism.

I remember how, in the eighties people expressed concern about offshoring and the flattening of wages, as plant owners steadfastly, stubbornly, and one could tell, defensively, maintained that they were doing what they had to do to compete with overseas producers whose labor costs were much lower. I'm fat. Remember I told you about the analysis of Dr. Rick Wolf? For one hundred fifty years American capitalism underwent an unprecedented continued expansion with worker wages, productivity, and profits for bosses went up every decade. And there was a sweet spot between 1945 and 1975, in which American capitalism stood alone uncontested, with the economies of Europe and Japan having to be rebuilt by buying American products. But that stopped in the seventies as those shattered societies recovered and starting competing and out-competing U.S. industry.

Offshoring was one of those aspects of the changing economy that capitalists seemed to poutily defend. But by the nineties the chattering classes were extolling the virtues of offshoring as one of the innumerable positive aspects of globalization, remember? They said that this process, somehow, made the economy more efficient (I'm fat). Thomas Friedman, the New York Times journalist said that the world was flat and that no two countries that had McDonalds ever went to war, (it was all about the healing power in international relations of shared commerce). Francis Fukayama said that history had come to an end. Ronald Reagan, in the eighties, of course, had said that "Government is not the answer to our problems. Government is the problem." And Bill Clinton had said that "The era of big government is over," and signed what many regard as a highly punitive welfare reform bill worthy of The Gipper himself, signed the Financial Services Modernization Act which killed Glass-Steagal, which in the thirties, had prevented the merger of commercial and speculative investment banks, remember? And didn't he sign telecommunications legislation which opened the floodgates to the unprecedented concentration of all media in fewer and fewer gigantic multinational corporate hands?

In other words, the nineties saw the cementing of the neoliberal consensus, or Washington Consensus. Also, remember, the nineties saw the rise of the tech or Internet bubble. And then it burst. What is the bursting of a bubble analogous to in terms of human biological functionality? Well, suppose one ate ten pounds of food, but the quality of the food is such that one evacuates, say, eight-and-a-half pounds of.................................. waste. Sorry to go on with this base analogy but what goes down the toilet bowl? Scores of small businesses, "start ups," taking the hopes and dreams of thousands upon thousands who have lost their jobs from those and even more established companies.

Also, it is my understanding that bubble periods are always accompanied by financialization. And of finance itself, Kevin Phillips wrote, again, in Wealth and Democracy (2002): "Speculative heydays pull in large middle class participation, fueling themes about the democratization of money and investment, at least until the bubble pops" pxxi - introduction. This is part of what I have previously referred to as the Ring of Sauron dynamic, remember?

Also, we must note that increased investment, perhaps from a broader base of the population, also responded and fueled layoffs of workers. Again, Kevin Phillips.

"Pressure to maximize profits and stock prices by cutting employees came both from top management and from Wall Street and institutional investors, the latter responding to yardsticks that a single layoff added $60,000 to future year bottom line earnings. If layoffs and downsizings continued even as profits set records in the nineties, that was because the layoffs and downsizings were often the reason for the profits" (Wealth and Democracy, p.150). Finance will finance itself in the space where there is no productive action to enable. And in this we see, in microcosm, the national tendency to bulimia, binge and purge, as well as the anorexic tendency, since, no doubt, worker productivity (those workers left at the job) must rise to "pick up the slack."

wingedcentaur

2010-03-04T12:11:00.000-08:00

Friends,

Its time to add this next mode of analysis. I am going to focus on finance capital and preeminence of finance as the driving force of capitalism today, and therefore what many think of as a new phase of capitalism. I'm going to use three metaphors.

A) finance as the metabolism of the body of the nation's political economy in advanced capitalist nations

B) the U.S. economy as being prone to bouts of anorexia/bulimia

C) the financial sector, as a whole, likened to an invasive parasite that takes control of bodies, possesses them, if you will, and indeed, makes these bodies capable of superhuman feats of strength and speed (but alas, burns through the bodies at an exponentially increased rate, such that they have find another body in a span of time of weeks and months rather than the several decades of a normal, average human lifespan. This is a plot point in much science fiction.

Think about the symbiot species of the Trill species of Star Trek Deep Space Nine. Think about the Tok'ra and Gau'oold (whatever) of that series based on the movie about the Stargate SG-1 (whatever). If anyone is familiar with the novels of Octavia E. Butler, think about the character of Doro in Wildseed and Mind of My Mind.

And I want to do all of this in connection with an article the Monthly Review called The Age of Monopoly-Finance Capital by John Bellamy Foster.

monthlyreview.org/100201foster.php

Foster began by citing an article he wroter for Monthly Review in 2006 called "Monopoly-Finance Capital," written on the occasion of the 40th anniversary, of what is apparently a seminal work in this particular area of analysis, called Monopoly Capital by Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy. The question he posed in the 2006 article, Foster had raised the question: Has capitalism mutated into another stage beyond that which Baran and Sweezy identified?

Two points.

1) Stagnation has worsened, he wrote. The problem of capital accumulation continues. He talked about the tendency of capitalism to oversaturate the market, to produce goods that are far in excess of the number of people who care to and/or have the means to buy.

2) and yet on the other hand, the system has found "...new ways of reproducing itself, and capital has paradoxically even prospered within this impasse, through the explosive growth of finance..."

We might say that the housing bubble crisis is an example of this one-two punch. Why were so many people given so many sub prime loans, Alt A loans, and ninja (no income, no job, no asset verification) loans? - stagnation (1), right? Because there were not enough low-risk borrowers to satisfy the needs of the system or the body of the system (2).

Finance is to the economy of an advanced capitalist society, what the metabolism is to the body. The metabolism is the engine that converts food into energy for the body to operate efficiently and store fat reserves. Finance is the metabolism and the economy as a whole is the body. Finance acts like the metabolism by taking a person looking for a home loan, a car loan, student loan, or loan to start a new business (presumably most of the applicants are "upstanding citizens" and all that), and circulating them into and through the system, and "adding value" to their society by starting a "home" and raising children and the like, creating jobs, and driving back and forth to school, home, and work, and so on.

When you try to sustain the body on a regular intake of low quality "junk" food, the metabolism has to work harder to retrieve anything of value from such intake. The sub prime crisis is an example of this. Here we begin the slide into virtual capitalism.

When food is restricted altogether, then the metabolism will force the body to feed upon itself in a desperate attempt to survive. What everyone agrees is the extremely speculative nature of finance is a consequence of and contributes to what is called the deindustrialization of a society.

In his 2002 book, Wealth and Democracy, Kevin Phillips wrote, in the introduction, "... the present wealth of the United States is tied not only to government assistance, public policy, and technology, but to the umbrella spread by more than a half century of American global economic hegemony. Eventually, however, the previous world economic leaders proved vulnerable not only to excesses of financialization but to transfer of technological advantage. These can dissipate a global industrial primacy in as little as a single generation. War and terrorism add to the risk" p.xx.

In this way finance must finance something, even if it is only itself. I'll continue with this next time.

wingedcentaur

2010-03-04T10:37:00.000-08:00

Good Afternoon Friends,

Where is capitalism headed today? I know I said I would move on to something else - and I will... in time. But I'd like to add another dimension to our multiphasic analysis. I've talked about the idea that Man is the desire to become God, and it is this truth, in my opinion, that fuels the capitalist dynamic: human beings tendency to mimic the classes above themselves, facilitated through the agency of credit, and expressed, for example, in the huge demand for black market "knock off" designer shoes, apparel, and the like, with the aim of projecting to the world a higher level of prosperity than you actually enjoy; all of the classes pursue the top one percent or top 0.1 percent, who seek to attain the "holy grail" of having "more money than God;" and in pursuing God in this debased way there are implications: God is presumably the possessor of all wealth by virtue of simply being God, who is not bound to tiresome "free market" principles; God is not a capitalist. Capitalism is irrelevant to God; So, the bourgeoisie, counterintuitively, I claim, feel capitalism as a constraining force, a necessary evil they have to endure - for a time before they can make their move, hopefully, toward seriously divine wealth (and this is so for the nominally religious, agnostic, and atheist); and we might also add that they seem to view democracy as a hassle, another impediment to their wealth creation and protection.

Man's desire to become God, as we have passed this through the various filters, led us to consider the traditional worldwide New Money-Old Money dynamic, that seems to have been in operation throughout time, all over the globe. We suggested that the underlying reason why Old Money always regarded New Money as uncouth, barely civilized, and the like, is because New Money is an uncomfortable reminder to Old Money of the more mortal origins of their own wealth. It is for this reason that New Money always, always, always wants and seeks to become Old Money (or God-Money). This is so whether we're looking at Don Corleone or some other "legitimate" businessman.

New Money is capitalist and Old Money is not, it has transcended or escaped capitalism. New Money tries to escape capitalism in at least two traditional ways. First, they marry into Old (God) Money families. The second way they try to quicken the "aging" process of their wealth is by financialization (and branding which is its twin) - and which is one of the alternative phases of economic growth I referred to as virtual capitalism, triggered when "natural" capitalism hits it natural political, social, economic, legal, and geographical limits to indefinite expansion.

This is both an expression of the bourgeoisie's frustration with the limits of, what to them, is a lower form of existence (like those "agents" of the system in The Matrix), and the impatience to take the next step to the immortality of their wealth (and therefore, to a lesser extent, themselves). Therefore, I claim, that crises in capitalism are the result of the capitalist ruling class, en masse, trying to flee capitalism, like a mass prison break - which is as destabilizing to the system, as is a mass prison break is destabilizing to a prison.

But remember that Man (all men and women) are the desire to become God, in various ways, but also in the pursuit of wealth, as I have described. Therefore, all of us, have our role to play and responsibility for what Slavoj Zizek (remember that Slovenian philosopher I told you about?) would call this dynamic of 'subjective violence.'

Let's move this to another post.

wingedcentaur

2010-02-23T15:37:00.000-08:00

Good Evening Friends,

So, we've been talking about efficiency and whether this is an abstract universal human quality that is equally applicable to all of the classes. As you know, Existentialism rejects the notion of generalized human nature. We are in concurrence with this, both generally [remember we talked about the Existential Impulse of Mate Selection - we used an episode of CSI: Crime Scene Investigative Unit involving the case of the conventional sized woman and her fiancee of extraordinarily short stature (sorry, 'dwarf' was the term used); we offered the counterintuitive analysis that contrary to the abstract universal human quality of physical symmetry, in that the woman takes a lover who is taller and heavier than her, the young woman in this series episode went decidedly the other way and exercised an existential judgment and chose a young man, of the physical type, incidentally to which we said she was, in fact, physically and sexually attracted to despite societal implications that she shouldn't, despite, interestingly, the powerful wishes of her father (himself a 'dwarf' who said that such a couple had a fifty percent chance of having a 'dwarf' for a child; and who killed his own daughter's intended husband)] and with respect to the political economy.

Despite the attempt to impose the idea of uniformity, human beings are individuals. The values handed down to us by the bourgeoisie in order to make capitalism work, are in a sense, the exact reverse of those followed by themselves, almost by definition.

Anyway, one last thing I'll say about efficiency and the bourgeoisie. Look at the documentary movie, The New American Century and note the system by which the contractors were employed in Iraq, something called "cost plus," and I'll leave it there. I want to suggest that the bourgeoisie actually get to practice the reverse of efficiency. They seem to literally do less for more.

The point I'm trying to make in going through these values - under the auspices of Existentialism - is that even though we all give the same nominal allegiance to these values, and claim to draw on these values very much more than we actually do (in the political economic sphere), we are, by our particular relationship to the political economy, called, or not called upon, to exhibit these qualities in very different degrees. And we, of the lower classes, tend to look at those of us who don't seem to be interested in towing the Calvinist line, as a bit odd, even shady.

Who is the class of whom efficiency (therefore productivity) is most demanded? Upon whose shoulders is a nation's gross domestic product measured? Is GDP measured by the number of companies a huge multinational entity gobbles up? Is it measured by investor's return on their bottom line? Is GDP measured by the number of securities, stocks and bonds generated and wired around the world in nanoseconds?

Is it measured by the number of wrongly accused people won acquital by their lawyers? Is it measured by the amount of justice a lawyer obtains for those most vulnerable and in need? Is the national output measured by the number of children educated (when does education, per se, start and end, by the way?)? Is GDP measured by the number of lives saved from burning houses? Or is it measured by the amount of stuff a country produces? It is. And who is it whose hands produce the stuff, in all their mind-numbing, back-breaking monotony? That's right, the working class.

Alright, we'll go onto to something else in rounding out this summary. We'll talk about the one or two of the ideas of Noam Chomsky, as they relate to the so-called free market.

wingedcentaur.

wingedcentaur

2010-02-21T09:41:00.000-08:00

Good Afternoon Friends,

To continue.

Let's take another abstract universal human quality or virtue that capitalism promotes.

Punctuality. "Time is money," after all.

Bourgeoisie: Of course there is no need for them to be "on time," as they set the agenda. In the movie, Get Shorty II, I believe, John Travolta's character, "Chili Palmer" had a wonderful line. He had a new car and someone made a comment that it wasn't as fast as some other car and Travolta's line was: "If you're important, people will wait."

I think that line perfectly encapsulates the bourgeoisie's relationship to time. Indeed, if Chili Palmer's statement were not true, if the bourgeoisie were as bound to the clock as the rest of are, then they would lose an important benefit of being, well, the bourgeoisie.

The Petty Bourgeoisie: they, of course, do not have the degree of control over time that the bourgeoisie proper have, and I do not know the procedures common to financial institutions where the petty bourgeoisie work; but I would imagine that ambition drives them to maximize their time at their computer terminals, so that they can get as rich as possible, and then join the proper bourgeoisie. I would also imagine that they feel privy to more of the rights to time than the rest of the classes below them.

The Upper Middle Class: the one group of professionals of this class, who I would say are the most enthralled to time, in their way, are doctors. It is daunting to hear about the huge number of hours expected of them, especially as interns and then as doctors in hospitals, except when they enter private practice.

Lawyers, especially corporate lawyers, have rather flexible schedules, as long as they get the work done. Is that not so? Accountants, I would imagine, might have slightly more regimented, except when they go into private practice.

Judges have a great deal of control over what they do and when. Professors have a great deal of control over their schedules.

It is important to understand that all three categories, Upper Middle, Petty Bourgeoisie, and Bourgeoisie are all free of time in a vital way. Their baseline compensation, apart from bonuses and perks, is not directly related to their number of hours worked per week, unlike the rest of us. Enough said.

The Lower Middle Class: Of course, they are bound by the clock. They must put in their hours to provide the necessary protection of society and other functions. But they do not feel nearly the same extreme pressures to time maximization that the working class does. And small entrepreneurs can make their own schedules - at least for as long as they are able to remain entrepreneurs. Don't quote me, but I once heard a statistic that said that eighty percent of new businesses fail in the first year. And this group don't have their pay partially governed by each new "account."

Working Class: this is the only class entirely enthralled to the god of time. Baseline compensation depends number of hours worked, period. Overtime is the holy grail, manna from heaven; and even one hour of missed work in one week, seriously hits the worker's bottom line for that week. This class has no control over our work schedule and on top of all of this, working class folks are the ones most pressured to arrive at their jobs "on time," and are at least verbally upbraided when we don't, even though we only get paid for the hours worked - and even this assumes those of us lucky enough to work at places where mandatory, unpaid overtime is not imposed and shadowy figures from the company do not go into the computerized payroll and subtracted on-the-clock hours and pay from their employees.

The Poor: they are, in a sense, bound by time in one very important way. During the "entitlement reforms" that occurred in the 1990s, there was the welfare "reform" bill signed by President Clinton, that delivered a serious blow to a system of guaranteed support for the most vulnerable among us, by mandating that recipients, mostly single mothers of color, find work within two years, when their benefits will be terminated. Not that raising children or something, is work, mind you.

As we go through these values, always, always, always keep one thing in mind: Man is the desire to become God. God is not capitalist, doesn't have to be. "He" owns all wealth by virtue of being God. God does not follow rules, he makes them; and we are not allowed to even question "God," but he damn well extracts "accountability" from the rest of us. Let us proceed.

Efficiency. "Doing more with less." This is certainly considered a virtue in the workplace, especially during times of recession. Workers are "laid off," dismissed or terminated, and are not replaced, by and large. The remaining workers have to pick up the slack and not only make sure that productivity doesn't slip, but, indeed, continues to rise.

Bourgeoisie: First of all, as we shall see later, there is never any "downsizing" in the CEO, CFO, COO crowd of the multinational corporations. And second of all, as we shall also see later, there is a distinct pattern of coddling of the so-called private corporation at the teat of what Noam Chomsky calls the "Nanny State." Thirdly, there is a pattern of behavior that points to the exact opposite of efficiency on the part of the corporate sector.

We are all familiar with various kinds of accounting scandals of corporations, with respect to overcharging, double charging, and triple charging the government for the delivery of goods and services, after they got the jobs through "no bid" contracts. We all recall the scandal involving KBR, the Halliburton subsidiary, in which they installed faulty plumbing which was responsible for soldiers dying of electrocution while taking a shower in Iraq.

There were other scandals of corporate war profiteering in Iraq, of course. I would refer you to an excellent documentary movie called The New American Century, which is available for viewing in full on the Internet. One involved a corporation that had been tasked with providing the troops in Iraq with clean water for drinking and bathing. A simple task, right?

It seems that one soldier noticed "something moving in his toilet bowel." He took a sample of the water and had it analyzed. It turned out that all manner of microbial bacteria, fungi, and viruses were floating around in it. The water hadn't been treated at all. Whatever the technical excuses that spokespeople for this company might have offered, we can say that this incident of criminal negligence is, in fact, rather reflective of the bourgeoisie/aristocracy's traditional, historical apathy for the public health of all the lower class - unless of course, there were any signs that germs did not respect class (see "The World of Capital" chapter in Chris Harman's A People's History of the World).

In a speech given at The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives in 2007, Naomi Klein talked about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina as climate apartheid (we needn't review the racialized and class character of the evacuation and delivery of services here, we are all familiar with it). She talked about the "Green Zones" in occupied Iraq, fully serviced American-style oases in the middle of the wreckage that is Iraq: its own electrical system, water, and the like; they are places with pristine, fully equipped operating theaters, as opposed to wreckage Iraqi healthcare facilities, in which incubators are held together with duct tape. The westerners get blast walls and body armor while Iraqis get prayer beads to protect them from the violence.

Klein said that the bourgeoisie (she called them, 'they') are not afraid of climate change or any other disaster because "They think they're saved. And you know what, they're right." She pointed out that, if you have the means, one can "buy" your way out of any disaster: you can turn up the air conditioner, stockpile Tamiflu and other AIDS/HIV related drugs; she said that there were people buying glacial front property somewhere, and the like. In her book NoLogo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, Klein talked about Sandy Springs, America's first incorporated, privatized city in Florida.

So it seems that the bourgeoisie are driven to push things back to a medieval situation, complete with the deindustrialization of America, the targeted extinction of the middle class [Michel Chussudovsky talks about the globalization of poverty; Michael Parenti speaks of the third worldization of everywhere, and even the reinstitution of slavery:

'"This is a book to make you angry. From Florida field-workers who pick some of the fruits and vegetables we eat to prisoners in China who make the desk lamps we can buy at Wal-Mart, Bales and Soodalter show us the manifold ways that unfree labor is woven into the American economy. And most important, they show us what we can do to stop it."'
Adam Hochschild, author of Bury the Chains and King Leopold's Ghost. That comment appears on the back cover of the book, The Slave Next Door: Human Trafficking and Slavery in America Today by Kevin Bales and Ron Soodalter. University of California Press. Berkeley Los Angeles London, 2009

"This is capitalism at its worst, and it is supported by a dramatic alteration in the basic economic equation of slavery. Where an average slave in 1850 would have brought the equivalent of $40, 000 in modern money, today's slave can be bought for a few hundred dollars. This cheapness makes the modern slave easily affordable, but it also makes him or her a disposable commodity. For the slave holder it's often cheaper to let a slave die than it is to buy the medicine to keep the slave alive. There is no form of slavery, past or present, that isn't horrific; however, today's slavery is one of the most diabolical strains to emerge in the thousands of years in which humans have been enslaving their fellows" (Bales and Soodalter, p.6).

It is important to be clear. We are not talking about the usual sweat shop conditions at starvation wages conditions, we are all familiar with. What is referred to here as actual modern day slavey is a step way down, another order of exploitation entirely than the "sweat shop."

And, it is important to note that: "Where the slaves in America were once primarily African and African-American, today we have "equal opportunity" slavery; modern-day slaves come in all races, all types, and all ethnicities. We are, if anything, totally democratic when it comes to owning and abusing our fellow human beings. All that required is the chance of a profit and a person weak enough and vulnerable enough to enslave" (ibid).

A slave holder can be absolutely anybody. Absolutely anybody. Like Sandra Bearden, a twenty-seven year old homemaker "in a comfortable suburb of Laredo, Texas -a neighborhood of solid brick homes and manicured lawns. Married, the mother of a four-year old son, she lived a perfectly normal middle-class existence. By all accounts, Sandra was a pleasant woman, the sort you'd chat with at the mall or supermarket... the sort who might live next door. Yet she is currently serving a life sentence, convicted of multiple offenses, including human trafficking and slavery" (Bales and Soodalter, p.3). They say that there are twenty seven million people in the world actually held as slaves today, and that's more than the total number of people taken from Africa during the entire three-hundred-fifty years of the Transatlantic slave trade (Bales and Soodalter).

But I digress, we were talking about efficiency. We're still not done with the bourgeoisie.

2010-02-19T16:24:00.000-08:00

Good Evening Friends,

You know, if you read the chapter entitled "The World of Capital," in Chris Harman's A People's History of the World, one is struck at the extent to which our very values and sense of ethics have been handed down to the rest of the population, in a top-down manner from the bourgeoisie to the rest of us. To ponder this makes one almost feel dirty and violated.

These values and sense of ethics were entirely consonant with, and seem to have grown out of, the emerging capitalist means of production. These ideals include: punctuality (as work became more and more tied to the clock and moved further and further away from the natural rhythms of the day and year); efficiency (getting the most productivity out of each worker through the least number of motions) - "time is money;" "clean living," (in the form of a stable home life - a man/wife nuclear family (such an home life, it was decided by the capitalist producers, that such a private home life tended to make workers more acclimated to punctuality and productivity; and this set the right example for the next generation of workers.

The promotion of organized sports by the bourgeoisie, in addition to being yet another means they had/have at their disposal, to drain away the disposable income of the working class back into their own pockets, also served as a means of promoting nationalism, something completely unknown to European popuations during the early periods of post-Roman/Byzantine monarchical rule.

There are other values of modern capitalism (in America in particular and perhaps promoted and practiced by the lower classes with special intensity since the 1970s), that have suffused society and have, arguably been imparted to us from the top down. What makes this objectionable is that the bourgeoisie, very nearly by definition and by the nature of their power, do not seem to feel bound by them and indeed, may not even see this characteristics as virtues applicable to people like themselves; and I would go as far as to say that they seem to see the exact opposites, for themselves as virtues.

But before we enumerate some of these others values, let me remind you of the ethical definition of Existentialism I take from the Cambridge Dicitonary of Philosophy (1991): a philosophical and literary movement that came to prominence in Europe, particularly in France, immediately after World War II, and that focused on the uniqueness of each human individual as distinguished from abstract universal human qualities.

So we're talking about the abstract universal human qualities that capitalism promotes - for the lower classes, of course.

Perserverance: "Never give up." "Fall off a horse, get back on again." "Winners never quit and quitters never win." "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again." And so on and so forth.

What this means in the economic life of our society is that when one of us loses his job, he has to find another way to earn a check. We are constantly enticed with the panacea of going back to school or "retraining." We are steered to career counseling and the like, with all the attendant services that go along with this. We're offered advice on writing winning resumes and sharpening our interviewing skills and the like.

A period of unemployment can be like a dark sojourn through the wilderness. We got to remember to "keep [one's] head up," "keep a stiff upper lip," and remember that "the sun'll come out tomorrow. Failure brings admonition, from various quarters to "try harder."

Do the bourgeoisie need to have perserverance? By definition, no, not when you are at the top of the power structure. When a member of the capitalist ruling class "loses" his job, for whatever reason - even by his own fault- he does not find himself "scrambling" for the next opportunity. We have seen this is so during this crisis of the economy with respect to the banks that were "too big to fail, which means, really, that the top executives, were, themselves, too big to "fail," go personally bankrupt paying lawyer fees, and go to jail, as we don't lightly jail billionaires in this country.

We have seen the irrelevance of perserverance to the bourgeoisie, as the recovery of the financial sector as a whole was heavily favored over the manufacturing sector, Detroit; especially in the way contracts were held to be sancrosanct with respect to payments made by AIG (facilitated by the U.S. taxpayer) to foreign banks and members of the international investment sector - having bet correctly, apparently, on derivatives- as well as unconditional bonuses paid over to employees of the domestic investment apparatus; while the living standards of auto workers came under relentless assault, as the CEOs (at one time even criticized for coming to a hearing before Congress, one time, via corporate jets) had to submit these "restructuring" plans proving their path to viability before the government would give them one dime. The banks were not subject to any such "accountability."

Also, when a member of the capitalist ruling class "loses" his job - whatever the reason, his own fault or some other reason - his departure from the corporation is usually facilitated through a negotiated settlement, perhaps allowed to resign, and he is, of course, given his "golden parachute," tens of hundreds of millions of dollars. He is promptly hired somewhere else (and he probably hasn't lost any of his, on average, fourteen board memberships) - long before you and I would have received our first unemployment check.

Be we, on the lower ends of the food chain, must perservere the turbulence of the free market.

Petty Bourgeoisie: they are the next rung down and don't quite have the social power of the upper capitalist ruling class, to persuade the government to "bail" them out and so forth. I guess you could call the petty bourgeoisie the near-rich. When one of these loses his jobs, I doubt that he has to suffer the indignity of "retraining" or the unemployment line, as the members of this group tend to heavily aggregate around the dominant sector of the economy, finance, or whatever it might be in any period in history. When one of the petty bourgeoisie loses his job, he is likely to get a very respectable severance package, so that he doesn't have to get another job right away. But he can probably get another gig soon enough, since he either knows a guy or knows a guy who knows a guy, and presto! he's got another job - again, long before you or I would have received our first unemployment check.

There is a speech available on the Internet given by Nobel-prize winning economist Paul Krugman in the year 2007. He said that the top "hedge fund guy," in 2006, had made the salary of all eighty thousand New York City public school teachers - wait for it - for the next three years. Such a man we would identify, I think, as the top layer of the petty bourgeoisie. You know, I had seen a story on television about a man who had been a hedge fund operator for a firm, lost his job in this recession, opened his own shop, but the economic downturn forced him to close his doors, and found himself delivering pizzas after having previously pulled down a salary of seven-hundred-fifty thousand dollars a year.

That he could fall so hard and so quickly marks him as a member of the lower rank of the petty bourgeoisie. No doubt circumstances do call upon him to exhibit a certain resilience, as he struggled, last I "heard" from the program, to keep his family in the large, petty bourgeoisie-type home (obviously he had some money saved. Ah, savings, what a concept). It looked like he was going to pull his children out of the private school they were attending. But a mysterious benefactor had stepped forward to cover the costs of keeping his youngsters in their school and with their friends.

Now, our friend, the sidetracked hedge fund investor/pizza delivery man, made an explicit statement of class solidarity, that illustrates that perseverance - to the limited extent that it is even called for , even by this deposed member of the lower echelon of the petty bourgeoisie - operates in an entirely different way than it would for you and me. He said something to this effect: he made a statement that was a combination vow, assertion, wish, and invocation that he was going to be back on top and be in a position to do what the mysterious benefactor did for his kids, for someone else's children. All he needed, he said, was to score a few "wins" that year.

First, families whose children attend public schools have no need of such a service. Second, you and I know that working people (low income and low-middle income) do not talk this way about making their personal recovery from extended periods of unemployment or underemployment, in terms of "wins," lightning in a bottle, unless, of course, we're talking about winning the lottery.

You know, our friend, the investment pizza delivery man, has every reason to be hopeful. The entire resources and power of the federal government is clearly devoted to the recovery of the financial sector, as we see, and which I understand comprises twenty percent of the economy, and which is far more than can be said for manufacturing - refugees from which must undergo the indignity of "retraining," seminars on writing winning resumes and interviewing and keeping a "stiff upper lip," and so on and so forth. And if this green jobs bubble ever takes off, why the investment opportunities should be limitless.

What about the upper middle class? Do they need perseverance? The upper middle class is made up of lawyers, doctors, college professors, journalists of radio, television, and print, accountants; politicians (my reckoning is informal and imprecise): they are generally, in terms of income of income and wealth are in this area, upper middle class/petty bourgeoisie, depending on their office they hold; and depending on their status in their party and the political system in general, they may reside at the power nexus of the bourgeoisie itself.

These are not sectors of the economy that tend to be cut back. We are familiar with the incumbency rates of American politicians and we have seen how the mayor of New York and the city council decree themselves a third term despite the wishes reflected by voters in two public referendums. These are not people, who, should they "lose" a position need to undergo "retraining." They may undergo retraining, but it is by and large because they wish to make a career change for personal reasons; it is not because they find their whole world crumbled down around them because of deindustrialization, the offshoring of productive capacity to areas with less expensive "labor costs," and mass layoffs, plant closures which seem to close down whole town and cities as well, and so forth.

The Lower Middle Class: police officers, fire fighters, public school k-12 teachers, unionized public sector employees, small entrepreneurs, nurses, x-ray technicians, EMTs, and the like. Here is where we begin to have need of the abstract universal human quality of perseverance. City and state budgets go through periodic cycles of "belt tightening," and so on and so forth. But these are "skilled" workers (I put the word "skilled" in quotes because I do not believe any human being, by definition, can be unskilled). There will always be need for emergency services, especially the police, and not to mention the prison complex, as long as economic inequality continues to deepen. There always be a need for educators, presumably, even in the privatized, corporate world of private and charter schools. Small entrepreneurs are on a more precarious ledge, as their business might ebb and flow with the seasons, and be constricted by other factors. And so on and so forth. But because there folks are skilled labor in trades that cannot be easily outsourced and offshored, we don't think it is likely that they have persevere in this political economy as the next two groups we'll look at, but I hope we are coming recognize, even now, that these supposedly universal human qualities are abstract because they are not imperative across the board; the different classes experience them or not, in vastly different ways.

Its important to say that these values we are examining were handed down to the rest of us from the bourgeoisie, and were necessary for us to "believe in" in order to make the capitalist system work for the ruling class; but because of this, almost by definition, they not only see themselves as bound by them (in terms of the political economy), but, again, almost by definition, they, as a matter of course, practice the very opposites of these values; and it is vital to note that each of us claim to draw on these values much more than we actually do, as everybody knows, America is the land of the "rugged individual." This gulf between the claim and the reality will come into stark relief when we acquaint ourselves, very briefly, with the analysis of Noam Chomsky, concerning the actual nature of the free market, and we will see how, in addition to the structure of our political economy, the very nature of what we think of as the component parts of our sense of values, were, in fact, handed down to us by the bourgeoisie, in a kind of paternalistic, do as I say not as I do form.

Working Class: people who work in the "unskilled" or "low skilled" service sector, all the lower echelons of retail, all non-supervisory personnel certainly; people work in factories - most likely lost them to offshoring as America transforms itself into the "knowledge" society, and so forth. Construction workers, mechanics, plumber, electricians: especially non-union workers in these trades; landscaping workers; people who work in restaurants, hotels, airports.

But what about perseverance? What need of perseverance do we, working class people, have? Much more than the classes above. It is this class who must persevere, who are told that they must "update [their] skills," and the like, when their world crumbles around them with the plant shutting down, as has already been discussed.

The Poor: here it is important to note the difference between what is called the competent poor and the abject poor (it makes a world of difference when you have access to some land on which you can do a little hunting and fishing, maybe grow some vegetables, to sustain yourself and your family - which what is called the abject poor do not have, of course).

The abject poor, of course, have the most need for perseverance, for obvious reasons; and they make for a compliant potential labor pool, naturally.

We're going to go to another post on this.

wingedcentaur.

2010-02-17T15:02:00.000-08:00

Good Evening Friends,

Remember, the (Man is the desire to become God) principle is the completion, the end-state of the idea that (consciousness is not what it is but what it is not), which is so because (the consciousness cannot apprehend itself as an object. At no point can the consciousness catch itself as a totally unwavering, unchanging, complete whole - like a rock, which is, was, and will never be anything but - and, as we mentioned before, this is something any Buddhist might say.

It is perhaps "human nature" never to be "satisfied," to constantly, invariably, although futily "grope for the infinite." In many ways this is a good thing, as this tendency frequently releases the creative potential. And it must be said that this drive to reach the unattainable mark, when applied to materal acquisitiveness, it's not so good.

We applied this tendency of human beings to ceaselessly reach for an unattainable point - as focused on material acquisitiveness - to examine the traditional intra-class tension within the bourgeoisie, the capitalist ruling class - Old Money and New Money. Old Money and New Money are terms used to describe the length of time a family has had great wealth. We proposed that New Money is capitalist and that Old Money is transcapitalist, or has actually been liberated from capitalism, which the bourgeoisie, judging from their actions don't seem to like very much and, in fact, desperately seek escape from; and this, despite the pronouncements of theoretically ideological, non-practicing capitalist.

The French philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre said something else: Man exists without justification. What does this mean? It means that God does not stop buy and say something like: Hey, Joe! Sorry to get you up at such an hour (The Lord glances at his solid gold Rolex). Wow, three in the morning! But don't worry about it. You'll wake up feeling better than you've ever felt in your life and I'll give you the strength of a bear for two weeks. Here, let me get that hangover for you - ZZZAAAPPP! There you go. Listen, I just stopped by to say I like what you're doing, overall, with your life. You're not perfect, of course. But then again, who is beside Me, hunh? But I want to give you particular kudos on how you handled that sticky moral situation last Tuesday. Nice application of my Commandments seven and nine. Joe, I'm hear to tell you: You da man! Anyway, just wanted to give you your props. (The Lord gives Joe's shoulder a hearty paternal squeeze). I'm outta here, bye.

That doesn't happen to anyone, whether they nominally believe in God or not. No one experiences such unvarnished, unequivocval, certain "justification" from above. Because this is so, we have developed innumerable structures of justification that seem to come from outside of ourselves; and depending upon our level of attainment in various areas, we feel ourselves to either be in or out of accord with "universal law;" and subsequently, to a certain extent, our feeling of self worth rises and falls.; and I think this helps to explain the generalized human tendency to class mimicry in material aspirations.

Whether one nominally believes in God, I would argue that there are very few actual atheists, in fact. Because man exists without justification, man seeks to become God, strangely, in order to prove he exists, or at least an idea of infinite capacity, in one way or another, at least, can exist. Therefore, the many ways we strive or "grope for the infinite," are forms of prayer, whether there is a nominal "God" that one formally "prays" to or not. And therefore, people (but again, we must particularize this for American society, for historical reasons we have reviewed) functionally "believe" that the more money and wealth one has, the closer he and/or his family are to "God." Have you ever heard the expression "She has more money than God?"

"God" is not capitalist. "God" does not have to be capitalist. Isn't that right? "God" possesses all wealth by virtue of being... well, "God." Have you ever heard the expression from medieval and ancient history "divine right of kings?"

To return to the New Money/Old Money historical intra-class tension within the bourgeoisie. Why have the Old Money guard always been slightly contemptuous of New Money, the world over, no matter where and when one looked? We proposed that the underlying ideological reason for this is the following: New Money is an uncomfortable reminder to Old Money of the less-than-divine origins of their own wealth, their own mortal past, if you will, which they desperately strive, daily, to forget. But New Money always wants to become Old Money, because they wish to enter that celestial realm of dominion and put their mortal past behind them just as quickly as possible. They wish to enshroud themselves and their wealth in the same aura of impregnability and inevitability and eternal pedigree that they perceive that Old Money enjoys.

The main traditional way New Money has always sought to become Old Money, is marriage, of course. We said that the main method today of "quickening" the "aging" process of their wealth (whether the subject be an international drug dealer, Don Corleone, or a "legitimate" businessman) are the various mechanisms of financialization, as well as the focus of corporations on selling "brands," while letting other, starvation-wage labor overseas, handle the actual production of stuff. Manufacturing cannot compare to the profits to be had from speculative finance.

We proposed that the bourgeoisie actually sees capitalism as a lower form of existence, much like the "agents" in the first Matrix movie thought of Earth. And because of this, they practice capitalism or anti-capitalism so ruthlessly. They wish to get as rich as quickly as possible so that they can break their chains and become Old (transcapitalist) Money, as quickly as possible.

In addition to this, we also proposed that every time capitalism hits its natural political, social, cultural, environmental, and indeed, its legal limits, either one of two phases of capitalism are triggered: virtual capitalism (financialization, branding) and "disaster" (a la Naomi Klein) capitalism. In his writings, Kevin Phillips talks about a discernible, historical tendency of "great powers" to periodically lapse into virtual capitalism (an over-reliance on finance to drive national economies and create wealth, concentrated at the top of society, of course), in the west going back at least to the eighteenth century.

We proposed that, therefore, crisis in capitalism, is caused by the New Money bourgeoisie, making an en masse prison break from capitalism through massive, astronomical applications of virtual finance. I would refer you to the October 15, 2009 show of the television and radio public affairs program, DemocracyNow! with Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzales. You can find it at DemocracyNow.org.

The first guest was a former bank regulator with the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation, William K. Black. Black helped to expose and unravel the Savings and Loan scandal of the eighties. The first thing he said that today's situation represented "one of the proofs" that finance had come "completely unhinged" from the real economy; he said that finance is supposed to exist for one reason, to make the real economy work better, but that now finance exists for finance's sake, and "in particular the elites in finance" and that "they harm the real economy on a regular basis and periodically come close to destroying it." Why? Aren't they afraid they'll destroy themselves as well? No.

Black talked about the scandal of the eighties. He said that there was an "epidemic of, what we call in criminology, control fraud." Control fraud, said Black, is what we have when the fraud is led by a seemingly legitimate executives of a seemingly legitimate organization. In the eighties the fraud had to do with commercial real estate, but today the fraud started in private home mortgages. He said that today, we're looking at another epidemic of accounting fraud. And so on and so forth. I reccomend you check out that episode.

The next guest was the Slovenian philosopher I've told you about, Slavoj Zizek. He started by paraphrasing Nobel-prize winning economist, Paul Krugman, who apparently said something to the effect of: suppose we could travel back in time, two years, with the "advantage" that the financial people who caused the crash, would retain the memory of what happened two years later. Let's not delude ourselves, there would be no change in their behavior. Why not?

I think its because a inmate is going to try to break out of prison when and if he gets the chance.

One more post will do it, I promise. And then we shall move on to fresh territory.

wingedcentaur

2010-02-16T15:45:00.000-08:00

Good Evening Friends,

We are going to leave this topic, you will all be relieved to learn. I'm getting tired of it now and I've become repetitive, quite a while back. If I haven't made my point by now, I shall never do so. Of course, there are one or two points I might elaborate on, but... nah! To sum up, here's what I've been suggesting.

My whole argument has been animated by a single principle, given to us by the great French Existentialist philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980): (consciousness is not what it is but what it is not) which ultimately ends up as Man is the desire to become God. Having been personally persuaded by this, I proposed that throughout global history, the extent to which an individual might consider himself successful, depended and does depend, in part, on the extent to which he can mirror or mimic the lifestyle of the socioeconomic class above the one which he inhabits. You may have heard about the vast (over) self-designation of people as belonging to the middle class.

This tendency to try to mimic the classes above ourselves is reflected in the black market, as well as the discount retail set up, for "knock off" designer clothes, purses, and the like. In other words, there is a tendency to want to seem, to the outside world, richer than we are. I think we have to say that this tendency is particularly marked in American society because of the unique history of how capitalism developed in America. You may recall the thesis, I offered, developed by a professor of economics called Rick Wolf. America had one hundred fifty years of an absolutely unfailing rise in real wages for workers, worker productivity, and last but not least, the profits of the capitalist owners of the means of production.

It had seemed as if a "rising tide lifts all boats," and so forth. This seeming paradise, according to Dr. Wolf, helped to shape an American midset of exceptionalism. Indeed, one of the explanations bandied about during this period was to "look up" (He likes us better than everybody else). The American working class expected that we would be able to consume more and more with each generation. This went on from 1820-1970, says Wolf. But it stopped in 1970, for various reasons, and real wages have remained flat since the mid seventies.

But we of the working class didn't "give up" and stop consuming. Among other things we did to keep the consumption going, was to borrow, far more than any other working class. Wolf says that the bourgeoisie loaned, the money the working class should have been getting as wages, back to them; which they had to repay with interest, of course. Credit is the fuel that allows us to mimic the appearance of the lifestyle of those classes above our own.

Kevin Phillips cited Time magazine from 1977, which stated that '"the Affluent Society has become the Credit Society, and an insistence on buying only what can by paid for in cash seems as outmoded as a crew cut (1)."' So, where the ability to consume from wages ends, the ability to borrow, in order to project a sense of affluence, begins.

And an economist at Philadelphia's Fidelity Bank, Lacy Hunt, said, '"the ability of the consumer to take on more debt will be the underpinning of th economy in 1977. This is the year of consumer credit (2)."'

Personal debt began to take off out of sight in the eighties and this state of affairs dates back to "innovations" of the seventies. Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard in 1971. Currency trading and foreign exchange markets "boomed;" and future trading began in 1972. The infrastructure that supports the speculative exotic financial transactions we are barely aware of today. For example, the first mortgage-backed bonds started in 1975 (3).

Credit is our ability to project "affluence," and this has its contemporary origins in the fifties, Truman's America, actually (4). An entire investment (for the investor class) infrastructure was built up to bet on the performance, to oversimplify, that debt. You could say that the investment sector made real money off the fantasies of the working class and the poor. Think about that.

Have you ever seen any of those movies concerning Greek mythology or some such? Do you recall the usual scenario in which the "old" gods seem to begin to fade away? This is invariably explained by the fact that times are changing and Christianity and other new religions are gripping the imagination of the masses of the population. There are fewer and fewer people who believe in the traditional deities, and thus their anchorage to this reality grows steadily more tenuous.

But there are always one or two of the old gods who are determined not to go away. These tend to be the strongest willed of the old pantheon. There are determined to make the people remember them, fear them, and worship them. Usually they stir up an evil, Byzantine scheme, and then it comes down to a volcanic one-on-one battle between one of these "old" gods, usually depicted as bad or evil and some wizard or some such, who represents modernity or the "good," and so forth. The side of "evil" is concerned and ding dong The Wicked Witch is Dead!

The structure of the political economy is like that, don't you think. The Bourgeoisie retain their power just as long as most of us are willing to believe, in what Ronald Reagan once called, "... the magic of the marketplace." Valhalla, Olympus.... whatever.

And while we're on the subject of Ronald Reagan (and George W. Bush, his political heir in many people's view), you may recall that I proposed another connection. I wondered if there might have been a connection between the deregulation of finance that started off in the seventies and eighties, which, of course, mostly benefitted the rich - and the marketing (via the infomercal) of certain get-rich-quick techniques. Therefore, did George W. Bush, and to a smaller extent, Ronald Reagan before him, see themselves as a kind of Republican Prometheus, giving the lower classes a magical means to the good life, especially since hope was bleak that America would ever again be the industrial force it had been in the post war years up until the seventies, for various reasons.

I don't know if I ever mentioned this, but I have privately wondered if George W. Bush, with his famously tolerant attitude toward undocumented workers from Mexico, - somewhat unusual for a Republican - his advocacy of a "guest worker" program and the like, hadn't privately conceived that illegal Mexican immigrants might, somehow, be made to comprise the new American underclass, while everyone else is enjoying the good life - that is, until these, now undocumented Mexican worker, become fully assimilated, and they, too, can make millions buying real estate with no money down, and so forth. Then repeat the process, perhaps changing the demographic of global desperate brought into country.

But I suggested another interpretation. Beware the Ring of Sauron, I said, of these techniques which seem targeted to the working class. In other words, such things like buying real estate with no money down and placing ads (for whatever) in newspaper or the Internet, selling odds and ends from some warehouse, and others, and of course the faith exercise of buying lottery tickets are the poor man's version of what the rich man does, in todays deregulated finance. But as I pointed out before, all fantasy stories of the Ring of Sauron paradigm, never end well for the mortal that has come into possession of the godly ornament.

That is, because as I said before, the mortal remains as comparatively fragile as ever. He does not have the invulnerability to protect himself, as the god does, to protect himself from the very forces he unleashes. I wondered if there might not be some real life analog to this dynamic. I theorized that there must be. The analog I proposed was this: the rich do things with respect to their financial and business dealings, certain things on the edge of legal propriety, and routinely get away with it (or, indeed, do these things without anyone ever acknowledging the commission of a crime); but if the lower classes try to do similar things, analogous things, they may suffer penalties and deprivations, up to and including getting the book thrown at you and being sent to prison.

Let's take one example. Democratic senator, Tom Daschle had to withdraw his name from nomination for a cabinet post in the Obama Administration over taxes. The present Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner, also had a tax issue. I didn't pay attention to the details but he had a tax issue. Many people said that, having previously been the president of the New York federal reserve bank, Mr. Geithner should have known better. In any event, he said he was sorry and then went on to be overwhelmingly confirmed to the post by the senate.

This comes under the category of "Kids, don't try this at home!" Credit checks are a routine part of the backround investigation for prospective employees for even very low level, low skill, low wage jobs. I bet it would be hard for a working class person to get a job as a bank teller, if, say, his record showed that he had an outstanding tax bill; suppose he accidentally bounced a check to cover the bill, because he'd thought an electronic transfer from the settlement from an auto accident would hit his account in time, but it didn't.... so on and so forth.

I didn't follow Geithner's explanation but it was something convoluted, I'm sure. I'd take a thousand to one odds that our friend wouldn't get that bank teller job.

Anyway, I'll continue with my summation in the next post.

wingedcentaur.

2010-02-10T05:01:00.000-08:00

Good Morning Friends,

The point I was trying to drive home last time was simply that New Money always wants to become Old Money, as we have already defined these terms, just as quickly as possible. This drive is invariable, universal, worldwide, and historical. There comes a point when the bourgeoisie seems to just get tired - for a variety of good reasons - of the struggle of overseeing production, and capitalism lapses or triggers what we have called "virtual" or "disaster" capitalism. As I have tried to indicate, this is so wherever we look, at whatever nation, in any time period.

I would compare this drive to the old caricature we used to hear about concerning the young woman, fiercely independent, flying under the banner of feminism, charge into the paid workforce - only long enough to land a husband, preferably a wealthy one, the boss would be good, so that even the work of mother and homemaker could at least be partially displaced unto nannies and other live-in help.

That is how the industrial capitalists are. There comes a point when it becomes too hard for them to achieve the profits that they and their shareholders need and want, when they run up against the natural limits of political, material, social, and economic limits of capital expansion. And when this happens, they resort virtual and disaster methods (created by them or merely harnessed) to get around those barriers and keep profits up; and they also aspire to the lordly aristocratic class, from which they see themselves as having "fallen" from.

Capitalism is see by the bourgeoisie, therefore as a transitional system at best, and as a prison or lower realm at worst. I claim, therefore, that crisis in capitalism is caused by a mass attempt of the New Money bourgeoisie to escape capitalism, at least the "free market" capitalism that is professed in the west. These mass prison escape attempts - and successes - are as destabilizing to an economic system, as much as mass inmate escape attempts, on a regular basis, are destabilizing to a prison.

Their primary means of achieving this escape or transitioning from New Money to Old Money, is the various techniques of financialization and brand-focus and speculation on financial derivatives, as opposed to investment linked to actual production. Man is the desire to become God, which is why New Money Bourgeoisie always wants to become Old Money Bourgeoisie.

We'll take a different tack next time.

wingedcentaur

2010-02-09T16:19:00.000-08:00

The New Money - Old Money Dynamic

China 11th century

The examination system now became a route by which increasing numbers of men from outside the circle of great families could enter the higher levels of the imperial government... The new bureaucrats were increasingly drawm from the families who had benefitted most from the comercial revolution... the rich merchants and wealthy landowners.

Chris Harman quoting a source in his A People's History of the World: From Stone Age to the New Millenium. London, New York, 1999. Verso Books. p.112

"The state itself was run by bureaucrats trained as scholarly officials, whose ideal was the country gentleman. This was also the ideal for the merchant's son who obtained an official position." Same source. A People's History. p.112-113

Byzantium 12th century

"Byzantium survived as a last bastion of Graeco-Roman culture because the imperial bureaucracy was run by a layer of literate Greek speakers. But it was a group that lived off the production of others rather than contributing to or organising it. It therefore prided itself on its remoteness from the material world, and was afraid of any class emerging whose closeness to production might lead to it diverting some of the surplus into its own pockets. It is this which explains the sterile, pedantic character of Byzantine culture. It also explains the strength of superstitious and magical beliefs among all social groups. The priests were usually at least half-literate, and their message relied upon simplified stories of the saints, tales of miracles, and faith in the magic of holy relics." A People's History. p.121

The Islamic Empire 8th century

"The unification of a vast area into a single empire gave an enormous boost to the trade in luxuries. Merchants, shopkeepers, clerks and artisans flocked to the garrison cities, settling in growing suburbs around their walls and providing for the needs of the Arab rulers, their palaces, their armies and their administrators. Mostly they were non-Arabs, but were attracted to the religion of their rulers - which was, after all, not all that different from the monotheistic religions that had dominated the old empires. But the Arab Muslims were not keen to extend the newcomers their religious right to tax exemption and a share in the tribute. So new converts were designated mawali and excluded from the privileges of the Arabs, who regarded themselves as the only genuine Muslims.

"By the time the Arab Empire was a century old, the non-Arab Muslims were the majority in the cities of the empire and the key to its industries and trade, which the Arabs merchants had abandoned to become a new aristocracy." A People's History. pp.127-128

Class collusion among Arab and Persian aristocracies: same period

The surviving Persian aristocracy cooperated with the Arab state as long [as] the state recognized its privileges. On conversion it exchanged its Zoroastrian for a Muslim orthodoxy. The Islamised Persian townfolk and peasants exchanged their Zoroastrian for Islamic heresies directed against the aristocracy, both Arab and Persian. Chris Harman quoting a source in People's History, p.128

One can imagine that the Persian hereditary nobility probably gave tutelage in proper comportment for the new Arab emerging elites not yet used to such things.

European feudalism 14th century

"The lords grew ever more remote from the practicalities of producing the wealth they consumed. The descendants of the warriors in rough fortresses resided in elaborate castles, cloaked themselves in silk and engaged in expensive courtly and knightly rituals which asserted their superiority over other social groups. They regarded themselves as a caste apart from everybody else, with hereditary legal rights sanctioned by religious ceremonies. Within this caste an elaborate gradation of ranks separated the great aristocrats from the ordinary knights who were legally dependent on them. But all its layers were increasingly disdainful of anyone involved in actually creating wealth - whether wealthy merchants, humble artisans or impoverished peasants. The popes, abbots and bishops were part of this ruling class and shared its attitudes, but had distinct interests of their own." A People's History, p.147

"The popes, bishops and abbots also devoted themselves to upholding the wider values they shared in common with the lords. The cathedrals, the greatest artistic creations of the period, were also the greatest symbol of the power of the ruling class, emphasising the God-ordained character of society, with heavenly hierarchies of angels, saints and humans corresponding to earthly hierarchies of kings, lords, abbots, bishops, knights and commoners." A People's History, p.148.

We'll sum it all up next time.

wingedcentaur.

2010-02-07T04:47:00.000-08:00

Friends,

The destabilization, degradation, and deindustrialization here, in America, seems to have a connection to degradation of work, deindustrialization (after a necessary period of industrialization to make cheap consumer goods for the consumerist developed world), and destabilization, abroad.

Here, in America, in the nineties, we were given to understand, by then-vice president Al Gore, among others, that we were transitioning from an industrial economy to a "knowledge-based" economy. We were given to understand that, therefore, a college education would and has become more crucial to sucess in the "new" economy than ever before, and so forth. Be a lawyer, a doctor, accountant, journalist (but for how much longer with newspapers undergoing the big squeeze and media consolidation continuing to throw reporters out of work?); but best of all, be high-tech, remember?

and yet "... today's high-tech jobs are as unstable as any other. Part-timers, temps, and contractors are rampant in Silicon Valley - a recent labor study of the region estimates that between 27 and 40 percent of the Valley's employees are "contingency workers," and the use of temps there is increasing at twice the rate of the rest of the country. The percentage of Silicon Valley workers employed by temp agencies is nearly three times the national average" (1).

1. Klein, Naomi. NoLogo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies. New York, New York. Picador. p.249

I want to take a look at one last story from NoLogo that I think is marvelously instructive about the nuances of class solidarity, as it relates to the art of branding. We shall also see, in this tale, just how Wall Street is moved by "spiritual goals as well as economic ones," - that is, apart from the way in which we have been insisting that the spiritual and ideological are intrinsically intertwined with the material.

"Branding" and "financialization," as I have mentioned are two sides of the same coin. They both point to a desire, on the part of the New Money bourgoisie to transcend capitalism into the realm of Old Money, which, as we have also previously insisted, decidedly is not and never has been, capitalist.

In the late nineties, the Sara Lee corporation was a successful conglomerate of the old school. In addition to its own frozen food line of products, the organization also owned 'They plump when you cook 'em," Ball Park Franks, Hanes Underwear, Wonderbra, Coach Leather Goods, Kiwi Shoe Polish,, and Champion Sports Apparel. It had solid growth, healthy profits, good stock return, no debt, and profits - which had risen ten percent in the fiscal year 1996-1997 - of one billion dollars (2).

And yet, Wall Street analysts had apparently become disenchanted with the organization, deriding them as "lumpy object purveyors." They began undervaluing Sara Lee's stock. Not good, of course. To correct the situation, starting in September of 1997, the company announced a 1.6 billion dollar restructuring plan, that would enable them to get out of the "stuff" making business. Thirteen of its factories were sold to contractors, who became Sara Lee's suppliers. Sara Lee would use the savings to double its ad spending (3).

The plan worked and Sara Lee's CEO, a man called John H. Bryan did a mea culpa, saying, "It's passe for us to be as vertically integrated as we were." As a reward the company was treated to a fifteen percent rise in their stock price and flattering portraits of its bold and imaginative CEO in the business press (3).

You know what this story reminds me of? A Hindu tale I read once. It seems there were these three gods - let's call them god A , god B, and god C, mainly because I've long forgotten their names. One day they were in their divine repose, in their celestial realm, contemplating the unity of all things, so on and so forth. In other words, they were just chillin.'

B became curious about the nature of life on Earth. So, he descended to our planet and took the body of a pig. He did what pigs do, as far as we know. He oinked-oinked, ate absolutely anything imaginable, and suppose quite a few things unimaginable, and rolled around in slop. A and C looked on, amused at first. But then some time went by with no sign that their divine friend and companion was coming back. You know what they say, "Happy as a pig in s---."

Not only that, but the god-pig took a female pig mate and, with her, had pig children. At this time A and C's curious amusement morphed into impatience and amazement. A said to C, one day, 'You know, I think B's gone native. I think he really believes he is a pig and not a god at all!'

A and C sought to shock B out of his delusion by killing his pig mate and pig children. They did so, but with no effect. The god-pig reacted to this turn of events, however pigs react to such things, but he did not shed his succulent, porky existence.

Finally, the A and C destroyed the pig body of their friend. B returned to his true state and to his celestial companions, relieved and grateful, of course. You see the parallels, don't you? Wall Street and the business press play the roles of gods A and C. Sara Lee corporation is god B, ignorantly trolling around in a lower form of existence, one that A and C (both the gods of heaven and Wall Street) view as beneath B (the third god of heaven and Sara Lee.

It does not matter to the other two of the triumvirate (A and C gods of heaven and Wall Street) that B (the third god of heaven and Sara Lee) is seemingly content, happy, and indeed, thriving. What matters is that B' s earth-bound presence is an affront to the dignity of the godhood as a whole (heaven and Wall Street).

Therefore, the fallen son must be chastised and reminded of his proper station in the scheme of things. If I understood Naomi Klein right, there had been no logic to how Wall Street had treated Sara Lee during its pre "restructuring" period, than this, the fact that "... Wall Street,... is guided by spiritual goals as well as economic ones."

2. ibid. p. 199

3. ibid., p.200

More next time.

wingedcentaur

2010-02-07T04:13:00.000-08:00

Good Morning Friends,

To pick up where we left off. It is important to note that when we speak of "branding," we are also talking about a different means of production that seems to go along with it. Again, Naomi Klein wrote:

"For some companies a plant closure is still a straightforward decision to move the same facility to a cheaper locale. But for others - particularly those with strong brand identities like Levi Strauss and Hanes - layoffs are only the most visible manifestation of a much more fundamental shift: one that is less about where to produce than how. Unlike the factories that hop from one place to another, these factories will never rematerialize. Mid-flight, they morph into something else entirely: "orders" to be placed with a contractor, who may well turn over those orders to as many as subcontractors, who - particularly in the garmet sector - may in turn pass a portion of the subcontracts on to a network of home workers who will complete the jobs in basements and living rooms (1)."

For some companies, the "sweatshop" model of "racing to the bottom," is just fine, thank you very much. But for other companies, perhaps, who have more of a public relations concern, but most definitely those with strong brand identities, this "entrepreneurial" system (as they, said corporations, no doubt would describe it) is preferred. This approach would certainly serve some ideological functions.

Such companies can say that they either have never had anything to do with, or have moved away from the sweatshop model - as information about its exploitativeness has been put forward.

They can advance the dubious claim that they are, in fact, doing a good thing for the poor people of the developing world, you know, by fostering "entrepreneurialism." One wonders how this intersects with the practice of certain globe-trotting venture capitalists, I guess you'd call them, who offer "micro-loans" to communities in the developing world. One wonders if the two practices, the "morphing" plant and micro-loans, compliment and sustain and even justify each other.

We'll go to another post and look at something else.

wingedcentaur

2010-01-31T15:30:00.000-08:00

Good Evening Friends,

Another way the bourgeoisie tries to expand and go past the natural limits of capital, is to engage in "branding." Let's get into that, but first, this:

Keep in mind the quote I gave you from The Communist Manifesto, about how the Old Money aristocracy had been reduced, by historical circumstances, to a critical, literary role of the emerging bourgeoisie. Remember that? Remember how I said that Old Money always wags its finger at New Money, at their newfangled ways. The former criticizes the different methods of exploitation used by the latter - different than the ones the former had used in different historical circumstances.

Here's what Naomi Klein wrote: "Indeed, a little side industry has developed of CEOs falling over each other to proclaim themselves ethical clairvoyants: they write books about the new "stockholder society," publicly berate their peers at luncheon addresses for their lack of scruples and announce that the time has come for corporate leaders to address the growing economic disparities. Trouble is, they can't agree on who is going to go first" (1).

These visionary CEOs, secure in the wealth and position, have now become Old Money in the individual sense. They can now afford to become the wise heads. Oftentimes, they get jobs in government.

What is branding? Naomi Klein says that, again, starting in the eighties, corporations made the strategic decision to get out of the stuff making business and get into the image making business. Others could handle the boorish drudgery of actually making the underlying thing, which becomes the talisman of the lifestyle the company is really selling. Outsourcing is involved, but of a different kind. But we'll come back to that.

Here's the kernel of Nike's appeal to disadvantages youths of the inner city.

"By supporting sports programs in Boys and Girls Clubs, by paying to repare urban basketball courts and by turning high-performance sports gear into street fashions, the company claims it is sending out the inspirational message that even poor kids can "Just Do it." In its press material and ads, there is an almost messianic quality to Nike's portrayal of its role in the inner cities: troubled kids will have higher self-esteem, fewer unwanted pregnancies and more ambition - all because at Nike "We see them as athletes." For Nike, its $150 Air Jordans are not a shoe but a kind of talisman with which poor kids can run out of the ghetto and better their lives. Nike's magic slippers will help them fly - just as they made Michael Jordan fly" (2).

That's it. That's what branding is all about. It is, of course, another form of virtual capitalism, that is triggered when the system comes up against its natural limits to expansion.

After all, what more can be done to a pair of sneakers to improve them and differentiate them from another pair of sneakers, at this point? Apparently, not much.

And yet, you have to go on selling sneakers. You have to keep competing agains the other guy to sell more sneakers than he does. You have to keep on keepin' on, to try to get more "market share," than the other guy. You have to keep on until you are the dominant player in the industry, or one of the two, three, four, or five monopolies (though we don't use that word in polite society) left standing, and so on and so forth.

You have to resort to advertising, to desperately try to persuade people that x brand sneakers are infinitely more desirable and cooler than y brand of sneakers. When this exhausts itself the next move is to try to grow your way to dominance, buying out as many as your competitors as possible.

I'll go on with this tomorrow.

wingedcentaur

2010-01-31T04:34:00.000-08:00

Good Morning Friends,

Another way that New Money bourgeoisie tries to transcend the natural limits of capital expansion is to engage in hyper-growth, mergers, acquisitions, leveraged buy outs, and "hostile takeovers," and the like. One of the things we learned from this financial crisis is that "too big to fail," acted as a kind of insurance policy. Recall that analysis of Kevin Phillips we have been discussing, about the strategic decision of elements of the U.S. government, in the eighties, about backing finance to the hilt, over every single other sector of the economy, a policy of periodically bailing out "overextended financial institutions."

The CEOs and top executives of certain hysterically monopolizing entities, must have breathed a sigh of relief when, according to their judgment, their corporations had reached a certain level of inevitability. The state itself cannot allow them to fail because of their infinite interconnectivity. Remember, deep down, greed always comes from fear.

In 1919 eighty-nine mergers involved 527 "concerns". In 1928, two-hundred-one mergers "repackaged" 1,259 businesses. "So many family businesses were pulled into the corporate orbit that nearly 20 percent of U.S. national wealth shifted from private to corporate hands. The corporate share of national wealth rose to about 30 percent, and largest 100 corporations came to command about half of the total U.S. industrial net income. Holding companies were another highlight of twenties restructuring (1)."

According to the New York Stock Exchange, of the 573 companies whose stock was traded actively in 1928, 395 were both holding and operating companies, and 92 did nothing but hold other companies securities. "Paper entrepreneurialism" (2).

And, of course, this current crisis has made us all aware of the 1999 Financial Services Modernization Act, which overturned Glass-Steagal of the New Deal era, which prohibited commercial banks and investment banks from fusing. And well before this, we were aware of the intense concentration of media ownership, for example, and so on an so forth.

One of the things, I think trigger mergermania, is the inherent lack of qualitative improvability and differentiation potential in most everything we buy and sell. Because this is so, advertising comes into prominence, becomes vital in fact. But I'll talk about this another time.

Yet another way New Money bourgeoisie tries to overcome the limits of capital, is through financializing productive industrial concerns.

"American Can Company turned itself into a financial services firm called Primerica, which several incarnations later merged with Citicorp. General Electric sold off its consumer appliance division, emphasizing huge financial profits of its General Electric Credit Corporation. By 2000 GE credit banks were as far afied as the Czech Republic (3)."

"Ford Motor Company came to rely on high profits from a subsidiary, Ford Credit Corporation heavily involved in global hedging" (4).

As, "[m]aking things became unfashionable, as Wall Street Journal reported in a November 1999 front page article. Enron, the Houston-based energy firm, financialized itself into a company that traded energy like stock options, becoming more akin to Goldman Sachs than to consolidated Edison" (5).

Now, these mergers, restructurings, and internal transformations cause lots of working people to lose their jobs. Again, Kevin Phillips wrote: "Pressure to maximize profits and stock prices by cutting employees came from both the top managment and from Wall Street and institutional investors, the latter responding to yardsticks that a single layoff added $60,000 to future year bottom line earnings. If layoffs and downsizings continued even as profits set records in the nineties, that was because the layoffs and downsizings were often the reason for the profits" (6).

I think what this analysis reveals is that there is a decidedly bulimic tendency in American corporate capitalism. Just as physical bulimia is considered unhealthy to gorge oneself and then throw up immediately - because, for one thing, the acid that is in the stomach and is meant to remain in the stomach to aid digestion, is brought up and wears at the lining in the lungs and the throat and the inside of the mouth, and what-have-you - it is similarly unhealthy to practice corporate bulimia.

The "binge" comes with the latest "bubble" (Internet, asset, housing, railroads, etc.). The "purge" comes when the bubble eventually pops. Then comes the downsizing, "right-sizings," that leave in their wake, tens of thousands upon tens of thousands upon tens of thousands on the unemployment line and more fearful for their jobs. Not only that, but as you know, those workers remaining at their posts have to work harder to pick up the slack - and you create a social order that breeds disloyalty on the part of employers, certainly, but also workers - which we may touch on very, very briefly (or not depending on time).

1) Phillips, Kevin. Wealth and Democracy. p.61

2) ibid

3) Phillips, p.143

4) ibid

5) ibid., pp.143-144

6) Phillips, p.150

Alright, next time we'll very briefly discuss another method of virtual capitalism: branding.

wingedcentaur

2010-01-30T16:28:00.000-08:00

Good Evening Friends,

Before continuing, let me take issue with one observation made by Kevin Phillips. In his Wealth and Democracy, he wrote: "Class warfare, however, is a false description, a perverse conservative borrowing from Karl Marx. In the United States, the pro-wealth policies of the right have enjoyed substantial low and low-middle-income support, particularly among religious voters enlisted by the cultural facets of conservatism (1)."

He's saying, here, that a class analysis does not work, because low and low middle income folks, at least, did not perceive themselves to be at "war" with the bourgeoisie, since their policies enojoyed support from sections of the proletariat - therefore it is impossible to say that the financial oligarchy are or have been consciously working against the interests of the rest of us.

First of all, let me cede a point to Mr. Phillips. I stipulate that, indeed, pro-wealth policies of the right have enjoyed "substantial low and low middle income support." I know this is so from directly related anecdotal evidence. Phillips says this is especially so "among religious voters enlisted by cultural facets of conservatism."

This sounds like a description of the so-called "prosperity gospel," the interdenominational pro-wealth doctrine of evangelical Christianity. In fact, I would refer you to Sarah Posner's excellent book on the subject, God's Profits; as well as an article in the December 2009 issue of The Atlantic, "Did Christianity Cause the Crash," by Hanna Rosin.

But these two facts do not defeat a class analysis of the economic situation. In fact, they strengthen it. The first thing to remember that the behavior of any class, as a whole, is never monolithic. And as for the second thing, please consider the following. What if President Ronald Reagan had thought of himself as a Republican Prometheus? Prometheus, of course, was the Greek god who gave man fire, against the wishes of most of the other Olympians, and was punished for it by Zeus.

A couple of things to keep in mind. Stay with me, but both Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush - who seemed to think of himself as more the political heir to Reagan than his own father - were both criticized by "movement conservatives" [the Conservative Party proper, which is not necessarily synonymous with the Republican Party] for the dramatic growth in the size of the federal government that occurred under their regimes. Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush have both been called "big government liberals" by conservatives.

If Ronald Reagan - and George W. Bush - are the Prometheus character, then we can think of critical conservatives as the majority of the disapproving Olympian pantheon.

Moreover, we must remember that George W. Bush did not run, in 2000, on a platform of hardcore conservative austerity. His Republican campaign for the presidency did not say, poor and downtrodden, be damned! He proposed a different way to deliver social services to "low and low-middle-income" folk, through the agency of "faith-based initiatives."

Now, back to Reagan. For those of you old enough to remember, let me ask you: What did Ronald Reagan mean "supply side" economics, and how did he conceive of the prosperity "trickle down" to the rest of society, especially those most in need of relief? I hope you will stipulate that there was probably a difference between the vision of Ronald Reagan and that of the technocrats that surrounded him.

Forgive me for mixing my metaphors, but have you ever seen Lord of the Rings? Beware the ring of Sauron! Sauron is the evil sorcerer supreme terrorizing "Middle Earth." Sauron made a ring which contained a portion of his power. He lost the ring, it had been cut from his hand in battle long ago. The ring fell into the hands of the good guys.

The sides of good and evil were going to have it out on the battlefield, once and for all, and so forth. But the hobbit, Frodo (the custodian of the ring after his uncle, Bilbo guarded it) and the team assembled around him, had the task of taking the foul thing to a certain volcano and dropping the trinket into it thus "unmaking" it. Gandalf, the wizard and one of the heroes, and naturally an authority on all things magical and enchanted and so forth, is absolutely clear and unequivocal about the necessity of this. "You cannot wield it," Gandalf says.

Fantasy literature is full of scenarios like this. You have a god or sorcerer or somekind of enchanted cosmic of other dimensional being of some sort, who creates a jewel or ornament of some kind which contains a very tiny portion of his power. And then he loses it! And an individual from a lower evolutionary order finds it. These tales never, ever, ever end well for the mortal who finds this ornament, whatever it might be. Recall the insanity of the homicidal Golem!

There was a difference of opinion within Frodo's team about the ring of Sauron. Some agreed with Gandalf, that the ring had to be destroyed and that there was no other way. Some thought that the good guys could use Sauron's ring against him, against all evil in Middle Earth.

So, when Mr. Phillips speaks of "substantial low and low-middle-income support," we have a disagreement among the proletariat about whether or not the Ring of Sauron (instruments of credit/debt) can be used against evil (poverty/the decreasing ability of the working class and poor to consume).

I agree with Gandalf. You cannot use Sauron's ring against him. Its probable that as soon as the ring comes anywhere near Sauron's person, the ring would fly off your hand, of its own accord, and onto the hand of the dark lord, Sauron.

Similarly, I am of the opinion that the instruments of credit/debt (Ring of Sauron) cannot be used against evil (poverty and/or the decreasing ability of the working class and the poor to consume). Credit - the need for it to maintain consumption - is the creature or ornament of poverty. Credit (this form of it and by extension, all exotic financial instruments) is poverty's own!

Let's return to the analysis of Dr. Rick Wolf, the Marxist professor of economics. Recall how he told us that from 1820 to 1970, real wages for workers as well as profits for the capitalists rose without fail every decade, as the productivity of the American worker continued to go up and up.

Then in the mid-seventies all of this stopped. The profitability of capitalism hit a wall, to which they responded by holding wages of workers flat, in relation to inflation. Wages have remained flat and decreased slightly, in relation to prices, since the late seventies - even, by the way, as the productivity of the American worker continued to increase unfailingly up to the present moment you are reading this.

Now, the American industrialists flattened wages by various means, which we do not need to go into here. They did it, is the point. This flattening of wages combined with steadily increasing worker productivity, produced intoxicatingly staggering profits for American industrialists. But this windfall was exponentially amplified for them, when they came up with the bright idea to offer the money - that workers should have been getting as wages - to them as loan, which they had to pay back with interest.

So, you cannot fight poverty or the decreasing ability to consume, which comes from stagnant wages with credit. Because without the ability to earn a living wage, where will the money come from to pay off the debt? You take out another line of credit, don't you? You open another credit card, and another, and another.... and so on and so forth, in addition to other means the working class found to maintain consumption.

But wait, there's more. We're not quite finished yet. You know, those Ring of Sauron-type stories never end well for the mortals, for the very simple reason that normal human beings do not have the intrinsic immortality or inviolability which might shield us from blowback, in case anything goes wrong with the powerful dark forces we try to control. Hold that thought.

Now I'm going to engage in an incomplete speculation. I have wondering if there was a connection between the deregulation of finance at the top of society, the federal government and the lower order magic made available to "low and low-middle-income" people. I'm talking about those infomercials about selling real estate with no money down, buying and selling... items that some warehouse will send you, placing ads in various venues, making money through the Internet, in one way or another, and so on and so forth.

The danger, from a Lord of the Ring point of view, is not that these programs don't work or are a hoax. Quite the contrary, the danger is that these approaches actually work!

However, just as it is never safe for mortals to manipulate the power objects of greater beings, it is not a good idea for "low and low-middle-income" people to manipulate the financial power objects of "greater beings," because the former do not have the political and legal armor to protect them from blowback, that is available to the latter. If the former make a mistake or misstep or try to do something that there is any legal question about, they could end up fined into bankruptcy, put in jail, or both. But Tim Geithner can apologize to the senate for not paying his taxes, and instead of suffering any penalty we, the public, heard anything about, he gets to go on to become Treasury Secretary of the United States.

So there is disagreement in the company of Frodo about the desirability of using the ring of Sauron. But what if Reagan - one of many who gave us the ring of Sauron - saw himself as giving us the gift of fire. Sauron was at war with all the folk of Middle Earth, who were not aligned with him, despite the fact that they had different opinions about how to fight the dark overlord: to use the ring or not to use it.

What if George W. Bush had a similar vision? What if the thought this could become an "ownership" through deregulated finance and privatization (of Social Security, for example, turning into interest-bearing private investment accounts; and suppose he, George W. Bush, never wanted to "destroy" or even reduce government, as much as make it portable?) could just about give all Americans a relatively, universal luxurious standard of living, with the only ones being left out - temporarily - being the undocumented workers from Mexico - that is, until they, themselves, became citizens (remember Bush was for a "guest worker" program, and so forth), and then the cycle would start again.......?

Let me close with this. Again, Kevin Phillips wrote: "Part of what Bad Money deals with that I have not touched on before is the financial sector's massive use of private debt and leverage during the 1990s and then again in the first decade of the twenty-first century to expand its size, global reach, and extraordinary profitability. This is less a market-based Adam Smith brand of triumph than a mercantilist joint venture with U.S. government authority, strategic direction, funding support, and periodic Federal Reserve or U.S. Treasury bailouts of overextended financial institutions. This is certainly in keeping with the mercantilist flavor of policies gaining traction elsewhere in the world. Some have labeled these apparent policies the '"socialization of risk"' or '"Wall Street socialism."' I think a better explanation is that elements of the U.S. government decided, back in the 1980s, that finance, not manufacturing or even high technology, had to be the sector on which Washington would place its strategic chips - would '"pick as a winner"' in the parlance of the era. Farms and factories were expendable, but certain banks and other financial institutions could not be allowed to fail" (2).

Now, these words were published in 2008 and the first quote comes from 2002. I could almost wonder if Phillips has had a change of heart, somewhat, on the question of class, except that he does not accept the idea of "socialization of risk," or "Wall Street socialism." He cites mercantilism from a national perspective. What about class mercantilism? What is "periodic Federal Reserve or U.S. Treasury bailouts of overextended financial institutions" but "socialization of risk" by definition?

He says that he thinks elements of the U.S. government, back in the eighties, made a strategic decision to "pick [finance] as a winner" over every sector of the economy. Let me say, that as far as I am aware, all "warfare" is full of strategic decisions and considerations. One cannot help the vast difference in the way that both the George W. Bush and Barack H. Obama administrations, dealt with the tailspinning finance sector and the automotive industry.

It looked to most of us that when Wall Street needed help, they got it, no questions asked. The Federal Reserve chairman, Ben Bernanke, didn't even want to reveal the names of the overseas institutions that got the bailout money, that went to AIG, that had to financial institutions that had bet correctly on sub prime mortgages, and the like. I can't even pretend to understand all of it. The banks got trillions (I heard that quantity one trillion is literally one hundred times the age of the universe) with no strings attached, as it were.

But as for the big three auto companies. Congress and the president kept asking these corporations for credible restructuring plans before they would get any money. Obama kept giving them deadlines to present credible plans and insisted on the removal of one of the auto company CEOs. And so on and so forth. These companies, like Pahlovian dogs, kept cutting jobs and forcing unions to do "give backs," of benefits and so forth. By the way, this brings up the issue of Wall Street bonuses.

The AIG matter actually provoked some outrage in Congress, of all places. Charles Schumer, the senator from New York said that if the executives didn't do the right thing and give back those bonuses, the Congress would pass legislation to "tax virtually all of it." Remember that?

But the usual route regarding Wall Street bonuses, was that the United States is a country of laws and that contracts are sancrosanct. But, of course, this was not the case with the contracts of auto workers.

Now, again, Phillips says that the strategic decision of elements of the U.S. government - going back to the eighties - was that farms and factories were to be considered "expendable," while "certain banks and other financial institutions could not be allowed to fail." Different "classes" of the population work in farms and factories and banks and financial institutions.

So, are the bourgeoisie waging class war against the rest of us? Are they doing it deliberately, consciously as a group? I would answer the first, yes. The second is more complicated. Some probably have a quite self-conscious antagonism toward the "unwashed masses," others act on a more unconscious level. Organizational behavior can be thought of as a train, leaving one station and heading for another. Along the way, people get off and get on at different points, or what we might call points of access. But the train is ultimately headed for the last stop, the station at the endpoint of the route. I'll leave it there for now.

1) Phillips, Kevin. Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich. Broadway Books. New York, 2002. p.xiii

2) Phillips, Kevin. Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and The Global Crisis of American Capitalism. Viking (Penguin Group), New York, 2008.

wingedcentaur

2010-01-28T17:52:00.000-08:00

Good Evening Friends,

In all of this, please remember that we are talking about capitalism. Neoliberalism is just a historically opportunistic, hyper-aggressive approach to capitalism. Capitalism can never be permanently reformed or regulated, because when this happens, the capitalists feel their profits pinched, and they look for ways to evade, subvert, or destroy regulation.

When capitalism runs into its natural, physical and ideological barriers to growth, this system tends to trigger, both what I like to think of as virtual capitalism (1), and what Naomi Klein calls disaster capitalism (2).

And it is a fusion of elements of both virtual and disaster capitalism which comprise what we might think of as neoliberalism. Remember, neoliberalism - a creation of the seventies and eighties - is the exact equivalent of the capitalism of the pre-New Deal era. But I want to take a look at a tiny aspect of virtual capitalism, here.

Neoliberalism is very concerned about intellectual property rights, excessively so, as we shall see in a moment.

I would refer you to an excellent documentary called Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. This, of course, is available to view online in its entirety. Just type in the title in the search bar and you will be taken right there.

The CEO was a man called Jeffrey Skilling, Harvard whiz kid, just the kind of big thinking visionary Ken Lay had been looking for.

Now, one of the on-camera consultants for the documentary was a woman called Bethany McClean, co-author of the book, The Smartest Guys in the Room. She said that one of Skilling's conditions for taking the job, was that he be allowed to use mark-to-market accounting. Arthur Andersen "signed off on it," and "the SEC approved it."

Mark-to-market accounting allowed one to "book" the anticipated, future profits the moment a deal was signed, no matter how little money initially came in the door, as it were. These anticipated profits were written as actual, received profit. Bethany McClean said that Jeffrey Skilling believed that the idea was everything; and that one should be able to book the profits from that idea, right away; otherwise some "lesser" man could come along and profit from an idea that some "greater" man had come up with in the past.

This pre-booking of the hypothetical profits, was converted by the "free market," into very real profit, of course.

For one tiny example, according to the documentary, Enron had built a power plant in India, at a time when nobody else would do that. The risk was considered too great. India hadn't the money to pay for the power the plant produced. Enron lost a billion dollars on the project.

Even so, Enron paid its executives millions in bonuses, based on imaginary profits that, of course, never arrived. I suppose, the mere payment of the bonuses signalled to the "market" that the profits had, indeed, arrived, and this pushed the stock price up and....

No one else would do it, but Enron had taken the risk, had had the idea. They had been bold where others had been timid. They, the "greater" company, deserved to profit from their enterprising daring-do. A small detail like the inability of India to pay for the power should not get in the way of Enron's justly deserved profits. To allow such obstruction would be to re-enslave the free market, stifle creativity and self-expression, to de-incintivize innovation.

If we say - as I, indeed, do - that this idea, mark-to-market, is applied globally by the United States, the hegemonic implications in economic matters can be seen. Now cast your mind back to the 1990s. During this decade, the chattering classes would come on television - and from the vantage point of American prosperity - talked about China, a real up and comer, and so on and so forth.

There are two points the pundits always seemed to hit, in reference to China. They would always say that China was "manipulating" its currency; and that China was not very good at protecting intellectual property. One got the impression that the Chinese central government was nothing more than a group of vampiric, knowledge thieves.

In any event, if your were at all like me, during those years, you didn't know what the hell the pundits were talking about, shrugged, and changed the channel to watch The Simpsons. But note this mark-to-market scheme. I mention it because there is some indication that the U.S. government uses a kind of mark-to-market system in reporting certain statistics regarding the health of the American economy (3).

Could it be that criticism about China's lack of protection of "intellectual property," has something to do with the central government's wariness of, or reluctance if not refusal, to permit mark-to-market, thus signalling a moral failure on the part of the Chinese, in that they were not willing or able, yet, to fully embrace modernity, decency, and the free market, and thus join the happy community of capitalist nations? That is an uncomplete thought, and I leave it at that. I could be wrong.

1) It seems to me that Kevin Phillips's books, Wealth and Democracy, and Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and The Global Crisis of American Capitalism, are both chronicles of the continuing descent of the American political economy, deeper and deeper, into virtual capitalism - where nothing is what it seems. I'm talking about the increasing financialization of the economy. This virtual aspect of capitalism is also reflected in the corporate emphasis on "branding," as Naomi Klein would have us understand, in her book, NoLogo.

Enron seems to have been an extreme, "criminal" example, whose entire operations, almost, were of a virtual nature.

Also there seems to be a virtual aspect to official U.S. statistics with respect to the true health of the economy. We are all familiar with the unemployment rate, officially, ten percent. But the true unemployment rate - when you count all the people who have stopped looking for work because they think its hopeless, people working part time who would like to be working full time, and people who are simply excluded arbitrarily from the unemployment rolls after a certain period of time, etc - is probably something like twice that.

Kevin Phillips talks more about faulty statistics in his book, Bad Money, in places. Also, there seems to be problems about how GDP is officially calculated; in fact, it seems that half of what is called 'international trade,' from the American side and globally, is comprised of intra-firm transfers of goods across borders.

If Corporation A moves some equipment from its plant in Milwaukee to its plant in Calgary, that is called trade. I learned about this from Noam Chomsky's book, Free Market Fantasies. Again, I have to admit, I haven't read it yet, but I watched the five part YouTube video with Dr. Chomsky talking about it.

2) The term "Disaster Capitalism," of course, comes from Naomi Klein's book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Virtuality is what capitalism resorts to when it runs up against its physical limits to expansion (environmental, overproduction, and what I like to think of as the inherently limited qualitative improvement and differentiation of products so that advertising [another dimension of the virtual economy, yes?], comes into play and it become necessary to assert vigorously that this ball point pen is infinitely different, more desirable, and cooler, than that ball point pen, and so on and so forth. But violence is the second phase capitalism resorts to when it runs up against its political and ideological limits, internationally. Shocked to learn it, but not everybody wants capitalism.

One thing we should note. In his book, A Brief History of Neoloberalism, David Harvey says that neoliberalization is not always initiated by the United States imposing that on a country through the International Monetary Fund. He cites the case of Chile in the seventies. He says that the Chilean case was a situation in which the Chilean bourgeoisie invoked U.S. support for an internal coup. The Class Connection. Harvey says that a lot of the IMF restructuring that goes on happens because some internal class formation, who cannot do it themselves, wants the IMF to do it, so they can have the economy they want, and have the additional benefit of "blaming" the IMF in a populist way.

wingedcentaur

2010-01-27T19:47:00.001-08:00

Good Evening Friends,

So, neoliberalism is capitalism, the old capitalism unbound, unchained, unplugged, if you will. It is the capitalism freed from New Deal era regulations and restraint. It is the 'new' 'liberation' or 'liberty' of capital to make a profit. We know this because capitalism under neoliberalism does the same things, starting in the eighties and prevailing today, as capitalism did in the 'Roaring Twenties,' and further back, during the age of the 'robber barons.'

Both eras of American capitalism, pre-Franklin Roosevelt and post-Carter, are characterized by similar features: manipulation of the stock market, rampant financial criminality ("control fraud" and other less sophisticated three-card Monte-typs Ponzi schemes), abusive labor practices toward women, either domestically or abroad in the overseas "sweatshops" of today, newfangled financial instruments, gross anticompetitive, monopolistic practices of big business, and the hysterical merging and consolidation of various concerns - which tended to raise antitrust red flags.

Neoliberalism is capitalism to the max, in response to perceived stagnation of profits, on the part of the capitalist ruling class. It's like saying: Okay, alright. No more fooling around. Now we're really gonna practice some capitalism around here.

More tomorrow.

wingedcentaur

2010-01-26T15:34:00.000-08:00

Good Evening Friends,

We were defining the term neoliberalism, as the geographer and author, David Harvey gives us to understand it in his book, A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Now, I admit that I haven't read it yet, I've only viewed the YouTube video of the same name, in which Dr. Harvey discusses the thesis of his book. However, if he is half as good a writer as he is a lecturer, then the book itself is certain to be enlightening as well as accessible.

Neoliberalism. The 'neo' comes from their [the ideology's proponents] adherence to neo-classical economics (whatever that is); the 'liberal' part was added because 'they' took the ideas of freedom and liberty that were really born in the eighteenth century, very seriously.

Harvey says that neoliberalism, as a concept of political economy, is complicated with many variations. But, broadly, neoliberalism is the belief that human well being will be maximized when a society moves to a system of unrestricted free markets, free trade, galvanized around doing whatever is necessary to create and maintain an optimal business environment; which will mean, of course, that everyone will benefit, society as a whole will prosper.

Neoliberalism tends to call for deregulation, the removal of standards and accountability that are seen as chains binding the soaring spirit of the individual and stifling innovation, and the like. The regulations are seen as an imposition of 'individual' liberty. By the way, I hear that the right-leaning Supreme Court has just ruled that corporations has First Amendment rights just like people and may therefore spend as much money, directly, as they want in political campaigns.

To some of you, this may sound like crass materialism and greed. But we have learned how inseparably intertwined the ideological or spiritual is with the material. Here, I must elucidate a point made by Dr. Rick Wolf. He says that from 1820 to 1970, the profits of the American industrialists, as well as the real wages of workers, rose unfailingly every decade. This was so with workers wages, even during the Great Depression, because prices (which real wages are measured against) fell a little more.

This level of sustained national prosperity was, perhaps, unprecendented, never duplicated anywhere else. The American working class developed an exceptionalist view of themselves with respect to the rest of the world. They tended to expect never-ending "growth" in the economy; and growth of prosperity from generation to generation. Children will do "better" than their parents, whose grandchildren will surpass them all, and so on and so forth.

A working class such as this, says Wolf, can be forgiven for coming to see their sense of self worth, their sense of success in life, by what they have: their possessions, goods, stuff, bling. What car? What mall? What house? What neighborhood? And so forth. So, the American working class, as well as Americans generally define themselves by what they have. Man is the desire to become God, after all. Remember what I said about class mimicry. All classes tend to mimic the effects of the classes above themselves. This very fact explains the black market volume of "counterfeit" goods, and so forth.

Neoliberalism tends to seek to keep taxes - on business especially - to a minimum. Taxes, after all, are a yoke, punishing initiative, "de-incintivizing innovation." Taxes, therefore, are, by their nature, in their view, an oppression of the freedom of the 'individual,' - to make money, thrive, prosper.

Neoliberalism seeks the world over for the most "flexible" labor markets. They find these more flexible labor markets in the developing world, and use the existence of these to pressure the domestic labor market to be more flexible. Government mandates about the minimum you can pay workers or what level of minimally decent working conditions must prevail at the factory, hamper the creativity of the 'individual.' The environment? Concerns about the environment are just another distraction, hampering the neoliberal capitalist from expressing himself.

Neoliberalism aggressively seeks out new markets around the world. It is the neoliberal thrust upon the globe, which is called 'globalization.' Neoliberalism seeks to break down 'trade barriers' of other countries with potential customers for American products and resources that American corporate interests would like to get a piece of.

Neoliberalism scoffs at policies of other countries that it sees as protectionist, or neo-mercantilist, we might say. Such "protectionism" cuts off American capitalist from foreign markets, and therefore oppresses the freedom of the neoliberal capitalist. Such a "regime" must be, by definition, anti-freedom - and the population of such a country might require "liberation."

Neoliberalism is capitalism, the old capitalism freed from the restraints of the regulatory and social welfare policies of the New Deal, Fair Deal (under Truman), the Great Society (under Johnson), and some relatively progressive policies of Richard Nixon. Capitalism had been "free" before Franklin Roosevelt, suffered a period of oppression, but then was free again under Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama, and beyond? In this connection we can think of neoliberalism as the new liberation or new freedom of capital to make a profit.

Remember, capitalism had an accumulation crisis in the late seventies. The defeated World War Two powers, Europe and Japan had recovered by the mid 1970s and put their industry to work to make their goods better or cheaper - in some cases both - than American industry. The good times (between 1945 and 1975 when American capitalism had no competition as Europe and Japan had to rebuild their societies by buying American goods) had stopped rolling. Other things happened too, but for the sake of time, we shall skip mention of them. The point is that there was a profitability crisis for American capitalism in the seventies.

With the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, the neoliberals (Milton Friedman, Friedrich von Hayek, and others), having lain in wait in their right-wing think tanks since the 1940s, thought they had their champion... and the rest is history.

David Harvey says that we should be aware of the extent to which, all of us - in a strange way - are neoliberals, how the society as a whole has absorbed the neoliberal ethos.

When New York Times columnist, Thomas Friedman famousy said, that two countries that both had a McDonald restaurant in them, never went to war - this is an expression of the neoliberal ethos. It is the idea that economic interdependence somehow insured peace between nations.

Fareed Zakaria's use to often say that, with non-democratic countries, the way you build democracy is to focus on building civil society first, with no small part of it being the creation and economic empowerment of the middle classes. At this point, these middle classes, can now pressure government to act in a way that is accountable, transparent, and govern by some kind of rule of law.

This, also, in my opinion, is an expession of the neoliberal ethos. With money, the emergent middle classes in developing nations, might pressure the government into giving them their "freedom."

Neoliberal theory says that just as there should be little or no government regulation and taxes stifling the capitalist's creativity, there should be o government intervention - when things go wrong for the capitalist. The state is, at best (mind you, I say, at best), the state role should be to make sure there is a "fair playing field." But mind you, many have noticed, including David Harvey, that there has always been a huge gap between neoliberal theory (argued passionately by the theoretical free marketeers) and neoliberal practice (as executed by working, "in the trenches," practicing capitalists.

Let me just close with this, now. It is in this gap that we see the ways in which the capitalist ruling class try to escape capitalism. We see the ways in which New Money tries - and mostly succeeds - in becoming Old Money. And in this gap between theory and practice, we see the root of financial and economic crisis in capitalism - the mass stampede of New Money bourgeoisie to break out of capitalism.

This naturally makes capitalism unstable, in the same way mass, concerted efforts of inmates to break out of a prison, causes the particular institution to be unstable. What I'm saying is, that in the same way an inmate wants to break out of jail, so too, do the oligarchy feel trapped by capitalism, as counterintuitive as that sounds.

This prison break on the part of the oligarchic capitalist class primarily takes the form of financialization, these days, and a focus on branding, as well as massive, forceful movement in the direction of what former bank regulator, William K. Black, calls "control fraud."

Control fraud is the accounting and other fraud that is generated by seemingly legitimate organizations. This sub prime situation is an example of what Black considers control fraud. According to Black, an FBI investigation has found that eighty percent of the fraud that happened in this housing crisis, was initiated by lender action. And so on and so forth.

Alright, I'll go on with this tomorrow.

wingedcentaur